Year 13 English Literature OCR A-Level Coursework : 94% Final Grade
In Chapter Sixteen of Tom McCarthy’s ‘Remainder’, the narrator’s reconstructions reflects the novel’s concerns with authenticity, identity, and creation. McCarthy exemplifies how the pursuit of the authentic conflicts with inevitable artifice: the narrator strives to reproduce experiences with Platonic precision, yet encounters only matter’s resistance and memory’s fragility. His re-enactments also cast him in a quasi-divine role as he combines artistic creation and tragic control. Focusing on Chapter Sixteen in this way highlights how McCarthy transforms the narrator’s private reconstructions into a wider lesson on the power, limits and consequences of self-authorship.
McCarthy shows how the narrator’s attempts at authentic reconstruction collide with the impossibility of truly matching the original. Repeated oppositions between the real object and its facsimile highlight his frustration that replicas can only gesture towards an unattainable, perfect original, never embody it fully. We see the narrator captivated by his recreation as “[he] watched it, utterly fixated. It was a perfect likeness of the van [they]’d used up at the warehouse… it was identical in make and size and registration… but then it was more even than the sum of all its likeness”[1]. The intensifier within “utterly fixated”[2] shows sustained, almost ecstatic attention- absorbed with his own creation. His declarative “It was a perfect likeness”[3] reads like a verdict in its certainty, reinforced by the syndetic listing “identical in make and size and registration”[4]: the enumerated technical details creates a catalogue of sameness mimicking the Platonic Form[5]- a perfect template of everything that exists which Plato argues humans strive to imitate. In believing he has achieved a “perfect likeness,”[6] the narrator is, in effect, claiming to have reached that Form. Yet “more even than the sum of all its likeness”[7] undermines this claim: the comparative “more” is hyperbolic, suggesting the narrator believes his copy outcompetes similarity and attains superior completeness. The movement from curt, confident statements to a boastful claim shows his rising hubris; this fallible pride is illustrated when McCarthy’s narrator amplifies the differential changes of the real van: “its sides more faded, its tyres more bulging, its edges more turning… more ready…. more dirty, more protruding”[8]. Here, McCarthy’s cumulative comparatives and the anaphoric “more”[9] intensify the sensory gap between copy and original. The effect is a sort of inflation: the real van is ontologically superior and the narrator’s conviction that his version was flawless, now reads as hubristic, revealing overweening ambition. Additionally, the syntax lengthens into breathless accumulation, mirroring the narrators obsessive attempt to capture every detail – a rhythm exposing the difficulty and impossibility of authentic reconstruction.
Similarly, observing onlookers, the narrator notes that “they were all doing it just right: standing, moving, everything – and this without even knowing they were doing it”[10]. The appraisal here uses the dash to separate automatic behaviour from conscious performance. Applying Plato’s theory reveals an irony here, because authenticity, for McCarthy, is not precise performance, rather it is a Platonic critique of mimesis whereby copies may reproduce gestures but not the unpremeditated reality of the original. Evidently, the crowd’s unthinking ease makes them more authentic than the narrator, even without deliberation, just like the real imperfection of the van.
For the narrator, recreating past events aids in preserving a threatened sense of self, reflecting John Locke’s notion that personal identity depends on the continuity of memory rather than persistence of the body[11]. The image of “an echo of an echo of an echo … long after the original boy has been forgotten, faded, gone, replaced”[12] demonstrates this fear of losing his selfhood. An echo depends on an originating sound; its very existence representative of something once present but now absent. By echoing the word three times, McCarthy builds a sense of diminishing returns: each repetition makes the echo thinner, fainter, and less real. The narrator’s re-enactments operate in this register. They are attempts not at creating but at re-creating, preserving through repetition what has already passed away- like an echo. The image of the boy kicking a football, eventually “forgotten”[13] and replaced, reinforces this anxiety. Individual presence is thus disposable, and memory alone ensures continuity. In Lockean terms, selfhood is not rooted in the endurance of the body but in an unbroken thread of remembered experience. Deprived of memory by his accident, the narrator fears that without reconstruction he risks obliteration; his obsessive re-enactments serve as prosthetic memory, desperate attempts to re-emerge an identity that he possibly senses is dissolving.
In his recreated world, the narrator exerts meticulous dominance over every detail. He delights in control as seen in his proud assertion “I’d scripted them myself; I’d told him to say exactly those words… same tone, at the same speed, volume and pitch”[14]; the tricolon, itself a rigid structured rhetorical technique, mirrors his desire to impose a precise order on his surroundings and the parataxis in “same tone, at the same speed, volume and pitch”[15] reduces human variability to measurable parameters and something that can be engineered. Furthermore, the narrator casts his re-enactments in liturgical terms, describing himself and the others as “devotees to a religion not yet founded”[16]. Here, he is concurrently priest and creator, the centre of a ritual, shaped entirely by his vision. His proclamation, “I knew the formation-knew it intimately. I knew which bit moved where and how… I’d created it; I’d dreamt it up,”[17] reinforces this god-like posture. The repetition of “knew”[18] within the simile of the synchronised swimmers, ratifies his claim to omniscience, while pairing “created” and “dreamt”[19] elevates him to be like architect and visionary. Through this image, McCarthy frames him as a choreographer who directs every detail with an authority that resembles divine command.
The destructive effects of the narrator’s project become most visible when reality interrupts his reconstructions. The first instance comes with the bag: the real one “bulged irregularly, in a slightly awkward way. It was hard to lift up”[20] and made “all [his] muscles [to be] articulated now, working together… without [his] having to tell them to merge”[21]. The tactile imagery stresses the bags resistance, showing that unlike the empty replica, it forces his body to function authentically. This moment shows that his simulations only hinder him: realness is imperfect, and only engaging with that imperfection restores authentic physical coordination. The consequences intensify in the carpet scene, when “Number 4 went down and he toppled over”[22] because there was no kink in the carpet. The blunt phrasing, “went down,”[23] reduces a violent fall to flat reportage, and this fall now symbolises the failure of the project itself. In real life, small flaws – a kink in a carpet, a pause in speech – makes things function naturally and feel genuine. In the narrator’s project, removing them produces rigid, artificial perfections that cannot hold, so the very ‘smoothness’ he prizes causes fatal collapse. Moreover, when cost and compensation intrude on the narrator’s reconstructions, the destructive nature of the his project is exposed. For him, money is “like rubbish … dead weight, matter,”[24] valued only as material for reconstruction. Reducing money to brute matter reveals how obsession overrides ethical responsibility: as long as the re-enactments achieve precision, people, injuries, and even death become expendable. As such, the settlement that funds his recreations directly enables these failures, showing that his focus on precision and control comes at the expense of real-world stability
Chapter Sixteen thus stages McCarthy’s central paradox: the quest to re-create perfect reality is both the narrator’s claim to authorship and the instrument of his undoing. Authenticity, for McCarthy, is not recovered by slavish reproduction, rather it emerges in matter’s stubborn particularity- the dirt, its awkward weight, the unexpected smoothness that makes the re-enactor “topple over”[25]. The novel insists that what remains – ‘Remainder’ – is just the residue of failed creation: traces that testify to both the ambition and the limit of trying to be a God.
Bibliography/Citations
McCarthy, T. 2006 Remainder. London: Alma Books.
Plato 2007 Republic. Translated by C.D.C Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Locke, J. 1975 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P.H Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[1] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 254
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Plato. Republic (2007) 508d-509b
[6] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 254
[7] Ibid.
[8] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 254
[9] Ibid.
[10] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 252
[11] Locke, J. (1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.XXVII.9
[12] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 251
[13] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 251
[14] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 253
[15] Ibid.
[16] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 251
[17] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 255
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 258
[21] Ibid.
[22] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 259
[23] Ibid.
[24] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 258
[25] McCarthy, T. (2006) Remainder Page. 259
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