McEwan Paraphrases McEwan: The Paraphrase of a McEwan Short Story in a McEwan Novel

One of the protagonists of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth is a young writer, and the novel contains several samples, excerpts or summaries of his writing. Some of these show strong similarities to Ian McEwan's own early writings. The paper analyses the textual connections within the framework of paraphrase, a notion going back to ancient rhetoric, focusing on one pair of similar plots, "Dead as They Come" (a McEwan short story from 1975) and its 2012 rewriting. While ancient theory of paraphrase seems to focus on wording, McEwan's paraphrase of his own early writing puts more emphasis on sophisticated ways of narration. The narrative complexity of Sweet Tooth makes the interpretation of the embedded short story paraphrase complicated too. However, when a narratological analysis faces the questions of who is speaking, whose voice is to be heard in various parts of the narrative, it comes close to the focus of ancient rhetoric about actual wording in a paraphrase.