ABSTRACT
Focusing on readers' expectations and storytelling, James Wood maintains that "most of Ian McEwan's novels and stories are about trauma and contingency". The critic observes that trauma is actually a radically contingent event, an accident that disrupts the lives of innocent people-yet not so in McEwan's fiction where "tight plotting" works to undermine the contingency of trauma. It is hardly a coincidence that McEwan chose to include Huntington's disease into his first post-9/11 novel. After all, the name and characteristics of the disease bring to mind Samuel Huntington's influential explanation of anti-Western terrorism, which "went mainstream" after September 11, 2001. Rather than ending with this apparent analogy between Henry's surgical intervention and the invasion of Iraq, McEwan chooses to abandon and disrupt the allegorical pattern of his work. Fortunately, reductionist empiricism is not the only epistemological framework offered in Saturday.
