'Neuroanalysis In Tom Mccarthy's Remainder'

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is a piece of metafiction that helps to “map the paradoxical remainder of the genre after everything novelistic has been subtracted from it”. It centres around a nameless narrator who, in the aftermath of an undisclosed accident, finds himself coming into eight and a half million pounds in compensation and uses said money to fund actors to replicate scenarios in order to find true authenticity. Marco Roth claims that the neuronovel “allegoris[es]the novelist’s fear of his isolation and meaninglessness, and the alleged capacity of science to explain him better than he can explain himself” showing how Remainder might use the neurological self to confront the capitalist market the narrator now finds himself in. However,
Tom McCarthy manipulates pre-conceived ideas of narrative structure to illicit this idea of post-modernity. For example, the narrator is unreliable: “She took away the table. There wasn’t any table. Truth is I’m making this all up” (54). By deconstructing this idea of integrity and authenticity of the narrative voice, consciousness becomes a “metarepresentation”. However, it does not adhere to “an illusory […] sense of coherence and self-direction”. Therefore, the neurological self is more a “subject of post-postmodernity” which constitutes more of a “cultural contraction of capitalism”. Remainder juxtaposes postmodernism and neuronovelist tropic writing style to create a platform that does not have to adhere to capitalist tendencies or
Its materialistic qualities undertone the needs of Remainder’s narrator, who focuses on the tangible: “everything must leave […] a mark” (11). This is unsurprising as William James states that “the moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter”. A drive for repetition must result in matter. Thus does this mean that a neurological tick must result in materialism as a form of Capitalism? Despite the narrator’s insistent need to see something in order to believe in it, he never sees the money he was afforded in the settlement. In fact, when he pictures it in his head he imagines the number rather than the monetary value: he is more preoccupied with the shape of the number, and the un-wholeness of the half, (9) than the physical manifestation of its worth. For the narrator authenticity places a higher value than