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This paper aims to offer a critical reading of the contemporary English author Ian McEwan’s fifth novel entitled Black Dogs (1992). I postulate that literary critics have frequently read his fiction for what it is not. As such, McEwan’s thought-provoking engagement with cultural questions has more often than not gone unexamined owing to a critical blueprint that, reducing his oeuvre to the topoi of violence, or to a gallery of obnoxious characters branded as psychopaths, typecasts him as a writer of disturbing, salacious fiction. Arguing that McEwan writes to dissect and criticise contemporary cul-ture, I offer a reading of his novel as a literary intervention into a cultural debate. I argue that of cru-cial importance in McEwan’s novel is the question of the narrative structure through which the differ-ent segments of Black Dogs are recounted. Drawing on the narratological concepts and terminology in-troduced in the works of Gَerard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, I examine the complexities of the narrative discourses of McEwan’s novel and its interlinking thematic analogies. Based on this read-ing, I conclude that McEwan’s intervention in the ongoing cultural debates of today makes of him a se-vere critic of our time.

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Modernist literature decidedly experiments with such modes of discourse representation as free indirect discourse (FID) to highlight the subjective nature of reality and reflect the estrangement of the modern subject. Accordingly, an analysis of discourse representation has proved to be integral in exploring Modernist narratives. The discourse representation in movies, however, has received little attention from film narratologists. After an overview of discourse representation in literature and film, the present paper examines Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece Mrs Dalloway (1925) and its cinematic adaptation of the same title by Marleen Gorris (1997) and its interconnectedness to present characters’ subjectivities. The basic claim of this study is that the (free) indirect discourses of the novel are turned into free direct discourse in the movie using the technique of internal sound or flashback. Although there are instances of internal focalisation in this movie, they are so disjointed or short that the dominant discourse remains that of the narrator. Therefore, the findings of the present essay demonstrate that Gorris’ film is not creative enough to bring about effects equal to or beyond those produced by Woolf’s or reproduce the underlying forces of “difference” at play in Woolf’s text.