<b>NARRATORS IN MAGGIE O’FARRELL’S <i>THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX</i>: BLURRING BOUNDARIES BETWEEN SANITY AND INSANITY</b>

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) is a tale marked by madness. Insanity invades the novel’s plot, theme, structure, narrators and protagonists. An omniscient third-person narrator and an unreliable first-person narrator are in charge of telling the story, but they conceal and hide information, confuse readers and jeopardise the narration. This paper, thus, analyses how O’Farrell represents madness textually through the works of Booth (1961), Felman (1985), Fischer (2024), Fludernik (2009), and Gilbert and Gubar (1979). I argue that, in order to understand Esme and Kitty’s madness, insanity needs to be studied all along with the madness of the text.