The Grotesque Body in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room
Abstract
In Pat Barker’s 2012 novel Toby’s Room, numerous portraits of grotesque bodies are found—from the pregnant mother and the deformed fetus, a dead man’s shrunken penis on the dissection table, to the disfigured faces of the soldiers who fought in the First World War—these grotesque images are closely related and logically intertwined in revealing the characters’ secret mindset and inner struggles, as well as foreshadowing their fate, arousing the readers a mixed feeling of sympathy and great horror. Relying mainly on Bakhtin’s and Clark’s notions on the grotesque body, this study analyzes the implications of the grotesque body in Toby’s Room, articulates the logical connections among them, and explores the author’s intention of depicting the grotesque body in the novel. The study concludes that 1) Through the narratives of the grotesque body, Pat Barker weaves the characters’ tragedies into the dim landscape of British society; 2) Barker is calling for the establishment of a new social order by depicting the grotesque body in the novel.
References
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