Multiperspective Narratives Across Media: Form, Experience, and Ethics

This thesis investigates the formal features, experiential effects, and ethical affordances of multiperspective narratives across contemporary novels, movies, and video games. At its most basic, multiperspectivity can be conceptualized as the juxtaposition of different perspectives around the same event. As such, it has often been praised as an antidote to oversimplification, resisting the neatness of a single, authoritative account, and giving voice to marginalized positions. Yet multiperspectivity should not be regarded as an unqualified virtue. In some cases, it can reinforce positivist closure, reducing multiple viewpoints to a totalizing truth; in others, it may drift toward incommensurable relativism, where all perspectives are treated as equally valid regardless of their ethical or factual grounding. In an era frequently described as “post-truth,” marked by competing narratives and epistemic fragmentation, understanding how multiperspectivity works—and when it falls short—becomes an urgent task. Drawing on cultural narratology, New Formalism, narrative hermeneutics, and the environmental humanities, this thesis examines multiperspective narratives as a privileged site to critically engage with complex present-day challenges. Rather than focusing on a single issue, I explore how multiperspectivity can prove instrumental in addressing a wide range of urgent topics—from school shootings and institutional heteronormativity to structural racism and the climate crisis. By prompting recipients to coordinate different values and beliefs, question their moral assumptions, and depart from clear-cut resolution, the examples of multiperspectivity I examine in this thesis can help us navigate the vast challenges raised by today’s sociopolitical and climate crises. Throughout the thesis, I offer theoretically engaged readings of novels by a diverse group of Anglophone authors (Ian McEwan, Junot Díaz, Rick Moody, Victor LaValle, and Jeff VanderMeer), as well as movies by Gus Van Sant and Hirokazu Kore-eda, and video games by Naughty Dog, Dontnod Entertainment, and Golden Glitch. By bringing together narratological theory building, contextual analysis, and close reading, this thesis contributes to the contemporary literary and narratological debate about the role of storytelling vis-à-vis a variety of cultural settings and thematic concerns. Multiperspectivity, I ultimately argue, is uniquely positioned to demonstrate how narrative form matters not despite context but precisely through it.