“[S]trange new air of myth”: Homophony, Narration, and the Modernist Autobiography in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Abstract: Ben Okri’s 1991 novel The Famished Road is something of an oddity in the canon of novels styled as autobiographies because of several of its formal eccentricities, chief amongst which are its striking lack of idiolects and the relative narrative insignificance of its narrator and protagonist, Azaro. Through the flat, homophonic linguistic register of the novel, Okri accomplishes an impressive feat of heteroglossia, presenting myriad voices and stories through the voice of his protagonist in a genre associated with an almost myopic dedication to the individual and his life story. By using a subtle frame narrative that distances Azaro from his narration, Okri peels away the apparently disorienting simultaneity of the novel’s prose and reveals the overarching commitment to the representation of voices and perspectives that the autobiographical novel typically subsumes.