ABSTRACT
The final case study of this book focuses on Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, which is inspired by the tragic murder of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor in 2000. Using the homogenous critical responses to Kelman’s first-person child narrator as an opportunity to scrutinise how and why child narrators are commonly assessed in terms of authenticity and credibility, this chapter formulates an alternative approach to child narrators. In contrast to the works discussed in the previous chapters, Pigeon English contains only vague references to constructivism. Kelman offers his readers the familiar innocent, naive and playful child that the previous five novels question, at least temporarily. Taking the novel’s paratextual apparatus into consideration, this chapter reads Pigeon English as an ethical and political novel that laments child poverty and gang crime. For this purpose, Kelman perpetuates the idea that the child is innately good. Pigeon English can, therefore, be read as an example of strategic essentialism, a work that points to the limits of poststructuralist theory in political contexts.
