Understanding through fantasy : applying a postcolonial lens to Christopher Paolini’s inheritance cycle

• Main Author: Sung, Grace Fong Mun
• Other Authors: Sim Wai Chew
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::American
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62775
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, I seek specific answers to the “realistic” implications and function of fantasy novels, specifically, Paolini’s Inheritance cycle. Here, I define “realistic” as our subjective reality outside the novel’s world of magic and dragons, problems that range from the personal to the public. Do fantasy novels have any concrete relation to our subjective reality? In order to answer this question, we have to consider Roland Barthes’ essay, “Death of the Author”, where he asserts that “to give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing” (Barthes 5). Although Paolini lived through neither colonialism nor the immediate postcolonial times, his work can still create conversation with issues that are essential to the concerns of postcolonial studies. Instead of trying to “explain” the Author beneath the work, or assigning it an “ultimate meaning” (Barthes 5), I seek to discover the Inheritance cycle’s “destination” (Barthes 5) by examining all four novels in the series. I posit that studying the postcolonial potential of the Inheritance cycle through examining cultural diversity, hybridity, language and power would lead us to discover its academic potential, pushing Inheritance beyond being a work of popular culture.