The Glint of Light on Broken Glass, Or, Murder in Three Acts: The Contract of Fiction in Action

This thesis looks at the contract of fiction in the novel - how it is created, how the terms of the contract can be identified, and at what happens when the contract of fiction is broken. This PhD by Practice in Creative Writing explores the contract of fiction directly with the reader through the novel, The Glint of Light on Broken Glass, or Murder in Three Acts. The novel makes the terms of the contract explicit, demonstrates how it is created, and explores the consequences of breaking the contract of fiction. I used a ‘strange loop’ methodology, which focusses on experimentation, reflection, and refinement, in writing a novel which explored my research question after identifying a gap in the literature around the concept of the contract of fiction. There has been a lot of work on reader-response theory, as well as schools which favour close examination of the text, or even the author, but relatively little on the individual contract of fiction generated between the author and the reader through the text. I discuss this further in the Methodology chapter. I developed a tool for identifying, measuring and weighing ‘causal chains’ which make up the individual clauses to a contract of fiction, which I discuss in my critical commentary. I also identified ‘presumptive clauses’ to the contract which are generated by the conventions of genre fiction. I examine both my own novel and a small number of other novels written within the narrow confines of the whodunnit genre in the Analysis chapter. This thesis has gone some way to showing how the contract of fiction, between a single author and a single reader over an individual text, is created. The tool that I developed for identifying the causal chains that make up the contract of fiction is a crude one. I have tested it only on novels within a single genre. Further refinements would almost certainly need to be made to make it useful for examining literary fiction where there are no presumptive clauses. Despite its shortcomings, this tool shows that the contract of fiction can be found within a text. It also shows that each contract is a necessarily bespoke one because causal chains are raised by the reader as they read, and the more experienced the reader is, the more likely they are to recognise them. I explore the contract of fiction directly with the reader through the novel. I show how the reader raises expectations from the text. And I also show how the author can use them to manipulate the reader and subvert those expectations.