The Science of Narration in Pakistani English: A Case Study of Karachi, You're Killing Me!

Abstract

One of the most exciting developments in Pakistan’s rapidly expanding literary scene of the last decade has been not only the boom in international publication and distribution but the growing use of Pakistani English. Pakistani English has come a long way in the last six decades from its humble beginnings when it was derided as a 'mongrel' by the custodians of 'propriety' and the powers that be, and today, Pakistan can boast of many internationally acclaimed writers whose narratives are read, debated, lauded, and awarded around the world. This paper will examine the narrative strategies employed in a contemporary Pakistani English crime novel, which also uses the style of reporting as one of its narrative strategies and discusses using it in a persuasive and gritty manner. The use of a reportorial style in engaging readers has been noticed and appreciated by critics and readers but has not been given significant attention in literary commentary. The importance of reports and news writing in our daily lives, and the increasing voraciousness of crime news readers, suggest that it is an effective device which has been deliberately used as a stylistic strategy to engage and persuade both readers and critics. Narratology refreshes literary analysis of the novel by offering an interdisciplinary framework that uses Structuralist theory to analyze discourse within a given text. To this end, methodologies focusing on the narrative and descriptiveness in the novel will be referred to. This paper will primarily use narrative and descriptive analyses to identify and classify various aspects of storytelling strategies used in the novel. The tools of narratology will be used to pay attention to characteristics that have gone unnoticed in the study of narrations of Pakistani English texts, or have been noticed but misunderstood. They will also be used to help us categorize and systematize the storytelling strategies employed in the novel.