"History Revisited:" Narrative and History in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues

Abstract

This study explores the interrelations between narrative and history in two Canadian and Quebecois novels. Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982) . Tracing narrative techniques in general and intertextuality in particular, the thesis reveals postmodern concerns in re-writing history. Both Ondaatje's and Poulin's novel refract the master narrative of History and its closed linear nature into multiple discontinuous histories. In accordance with recent historiography. they further unmask the textuality. and hence ideological embeddedness, of our knowledge about the past. Both exploiting and contesting historical authority, Poulin and Ondaatje inquire into the relations between art, history. and the structure of social and cultural power.