Postmortem fiction: narrative ethics, victimhood, and the Gaze in Muriel Spark’s "The Driver’s Seat"

Ibáñez-Rosales, Ismael ; Altemir-Giral, Ana Isabel

Resumen: Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat has long puzzled readers with its fusion of metafictional irony and tragic inevitability. This article proposes a new reading of the novel as a posthumous reconstruction of a real-life murder, shaped through the narrative lens of an intradiegetic reader-turned-narrator. Drawing on Spark’s own admission that the novel originated from obsessive newspaper reading about the murder of Marlene Puntschuh, the essay argues that The Driver’s Seat functions as a ‘postmodern postmortem’ – a speculative autopsy of a woman’s life, built from fragments of witness accounts, police records, and media distortions. By blurring the lines between victim and perpetrator, narrator and stalker, reader and plotter, Spark critiques both the ethics of storytelling and the voyeuristic consumption of female suffering. The novel’s use of prolepsis, forensic tone, and press-like narration implicates readers in the moral ambiguity of constructing meaning from violence. Ultimately, Spark’s fiction challenges us to confront the dangers of narrative coherence, and the discomforting power of imaginative truth.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.1515/ang-2026-0002

Año: 2026

Publicado en: Anglia 144, 1 (2026), 27-46
ISSN: 0340-5222

Tipo y forma: Article (Published version)