ABSTRACT
John Burnside's A Summer of Drowning is a perplexing novel with perplexing representations of minds. In fiction, third-person narrators liberally exhibit thoughts, feelings, and minds of all characters, yet in Burnside's novel, it is the first-person narrator Liv, a teenage girl who steps forward as a seasoned reader of minds. Daniel Hutto suggests that 'by far the best and most reliable' way of attaining knowledge about other people's reasons is the horse's mouth method, yet precisely this basic folk-psychological approach of conversation is interpreted by Liv as 'intrusion'. As Dorrit Cohn maintains, "Narrative fiction is the only literary genre, as well as the only kind of narrative, in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other than the speaker can be portrayed". David Herman most explicitly argues against the exceptionality of fiction by first noticing how fictional minds are accessible but not transparent, and second that every-day minds are not transparent, but they are accessible.
