The Humanism behind Jonathan Coe’s Narrative “patchwork[s] of… coincidences”

This chapter shows Coe's narrative patterns and "patchwork[s] of coincidences", to quote from The Rain Before It Falls, are to be construed as his main humanist answer for those characters to find meaning in chaos, resist trauma, and assert themselves. Coe's role in the development of the new visibilities of literary victimhood is first linked to such humanist writing, which aims at putting the individual subject back at the centre of action, decision making, and existentialist praxis. Coe's fiction posits that literature can become a space for extended freedom and self-awareness, thus voicing a message of its own in the contemporary return to humanism in literature and the arts. Acting and writing around vulnerability, suggesting that deviation is the way to narrate and, perhaps, react and exist, Coe and his novels give contemporary fiction quite an innovative formal and political agenda.