Reality and Representation: the Nonfiction Writing in John Updike’s “Morocco”

Abstract

“Morocco” is one of John Updike’s short stories concerning family travel s. With the attempt to blur the gap between fiction and nonfiction, Updike experiments in “Morocco” with a new form of represented reality, which reveals a middle ground between the discourse and the depicted world. Through  the portrayal of  real historical events by juxtaposing the overt family travel narrative and the covert Cold War narrative, the short story mixes realistic travel writing into a fictional representation of Cold War writing. The Cold War writing, especially when represented through a backdrop of baseless  fears, forms the covert narrative dynamics and integrates the narrative rupture in the whole overt family travel story where the unreliable narrative techniques in the tale, such as denarration, and disnarration, break upthe  narrative progression and present various possibilities from the fissured narration. It turns out that the various overt narrative possibilities are restricted by the covert Cold War narrative, thus, the variety of overt narratives in “Morocco” is always constrained by the Cold War ideology. While the travel narrative is at variance with this particular reality, the underlying Cold War ideology, nevertheless, serves as the universal representation.