ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a neuronarrative and a crime story, which employs a “detective” who lives with Tourette's Syndrome. In the novel, the discussions of the syndrome and the symptoms that concern high-level processes of consciousness, such as language use, are often discussed through the processes of the somatosensory system. It is possible because the storyworld of Motherless Brooklyn is constructed through the consciousness of the “detective,” who is the narrator and only focalizor character of the novel. The syndrome leads the investigation and the narration on side-tracks from time to time, and it results in a peculiar interplay between different modes of narration; hence, the condition of the narrator produces a pluralization of the narration. I argue that the narrative discourse is (dis)organized by the nervous excess of energy that characterizes Tourette's Syndrome, which is stopped from time to time then jumps ahead in a random direction, while at the same time, it also embodies the compulsive logic that keeps returning to certain points. Therefore, the narrative discourse can be best described as a specific kind of motion in space, carrying the potential of enriching the meaning of the story on a formal level.
