Terrorist novel

This paper poses the question of what it means to be ‘inside’ the terrorist’s mind and explore the terrorist’s mentality by means of a narrative, such as the terrorist novel and the terrorist memoir. Consequently, the paper focuses on authorial strategies of empathy and sympathy in texts that privilege the terrorist character’s subjective viewpoint and experience. The discussion operates on the premise that narrative techniques have bearing on the readers’ response to the story, even if it there is no guaranteed correspondence between a certain technique and a certain effect.  Thus,  the  paper  asks  how  first-person  narration,  the  interior  representation  of  a  person’s  consciousness,  and  extended  direct  representation  of  speech, can contribute to empathic and sympathetic effects in specific ways. After a brief look  on  the  ironic  method,  i.e.  alternation  between  ironic  distance  and  sympathy  for  the  terrorist  character,  and  the  narrative  of  changing  minds,  i.e.  a  story where  a  character  abandons  his  plot  for  destruction,  the  discussion  moves  into an extended analysis of three examples where the narrative as a whole suggests sympathy for terrorist cause and tactics. The examples include Yukio Mishima’s novel Runaway Horses (Honba 1969), Richard Jackson’s dialogue novel Confessions  of  a  Terrorist  (2014),  and  Omar  Nasiri’s  memoir  Inside  the  Global  Jihad (2006).
This article was published in Neohelicon in November 2018. Please see https://rdcu.be/5laI