Exploring How the Divergent becomes The Norm in Selected Works of 21st-Century Disability Fiction

Abstract

Twenty-first century literature featuring disability has shown a marked flight from the traditional and conventional representations of disability as sites of pity, compassion or fear. Two novels that ostensibly delineate this shift in disability cultural studies are The Quarry (2013) by Iain Banks and A Room Called Earth (2020) by Madeleine Ryan. Although almost a decade apart, the two novels portray neurodivergent protagonists whose disability is neither a badge of shame nor a defining characteristic. This provided the perfect opportunity to step into the other side of the normality divide and experience the world from the point-of-view of intellectually divergent characters without any of the negative bias of an external, able-bodied narrator. The analysis revealed how in the subjective realities of these protagonists the traditional concepts of normal and divergent were completely inverted thereby solidifying the idea that disability is not an absolute condition but a relative and socially constructed one and similarly authentic representations can go a long way in displacing the stigmatization and misconceptions surrounding the disabled.