| Summary: | <p>Writing a novel about suicide without taking the more predictable, formulaic route of concentrating the narrative on the suicide victim and her or his immediate family and/or close friends can prove to be a challenging process. It is especially challenging to write about a non-heterosexual character who has committed suicide without the risk of turning the novel into a “dead queer” novel – a genre of text often accepted by and celebrated in mainstream North American film and literary culture. Texts such as Joyce Carol Oates’ <em>The Falls </em>show, however, that there is a way to write a fictional text about suicide without succumbing to the “dead queer” suicide plot formula. Building on Oates’ unusual textual treatment of the suicide victim in <em>The Falls</em>, Canadian novelist Suzette Mayr explores Kenneth J. Doka’s notion of the “disenfranchised mourner.” By focusing on the characters of the “disenfranchised mourners” in her novel-in-progress, Mayr was able to write her fourth novel <em>Monoceros</em> without relying on pre-existing narrative formulae.</p>
|
|---|