REVISITING THE GARDEN-PATH NARRATIVE: RECONSTRUAL IN MARTIN AMIS’S LONDON FIELDS

Abstract

The article examines the garden-path narrative technique in Martin Amis's postmodernist novel ‘London Fields’ through the lens of cognitive grammar, specifically employing Langacker’s concept of construal and the concept of reconstrual. The study analyzes how the narrator, who proves unreliable through underreporting, misinterpreting, and misevaluating, leads readers to false expectations about the murderer in the novel. Four textual versions of the murder scene are examined, demonstrating how reconstrual operates along three dimensions: specificity (respecifying from schematic to granular detail), prominence (refiguring the murderer-murderee relationship), and perspective (relocating and reviewing from objective omniscient narration to subjective first-person account). The analysis reveals how the narrator's retelling transforms reader interpretation from anticipating the character as a murderer to discovering the narrator himself committed the act, while the supposed murderee orchestrated the entire narrative. The study demonstrates effectiveness of cognitive grammar toolkit in explaining reader response to textual cues, particularly how reconstrual dimensions illuminate the process of re-reading and reinterpretation characteristic of unreliable narration in contemporary fiction, offering new methodological approaches for Ukrainian narrative analysis.