Lying in Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World

Abstract

While rewritings of the Noah myth often question what Linda Hutcheon terms “cultural authority,” and re-enact the overthrowing of Lyotard’s “grand narratives,” Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World exploits lies and liars in a particularly marked way. Father, one of the main characters and character-narrators of the novel, fools his young children into believing, for a number of years, that they are among the last survivors of a deluge which wiped out civilisation, and that the place where they live is an island surrounded by the ocean, both of which prove to be figments of his imagination. While lies are a constant and overt preoccupation in this novel, as the two elder children begin to doubt their father’s veracity, this paper seeks to analyse in particular how lying works at the level of the textual apparatus of the novel, and how the implied reader becomes involved in processes of shoring up and tearing down lies.