Brian Jansen2020-09-032020-09-032020-03-??http://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw:80/handle/20.500.12235/109768This paper reads Joshua Ferris’s best-selling 2007 novel Then We Came to theEnd as an unconventional entry into the canon of 9/11 fiction. The novel, bestknown for its extended use of the first-person plural “we” narrator, deploys anumber of plot echoes and strategic elisions to draw attention to events that are—nevertheless—left unstated. Drawing on narratology and Freud’s sense of theuncanny (particularly critic Mark Fisher’s supplemental ideas of the “weird” and“eerie”), this paper connects the use of “we” and narrative absences to largercultural anxieties around the events of 9/11, ultimately arguing that the novel’sattempt to avoid “re-enacting the ‘terrorism of spectacle’” (Däwes 3) byforegrounding representational challenges runs into an alternate problem: turningreaders away from the genuine historical complexities of those events. The papercloses with a discussion of how other 9/11 novels have navigated this samedouble-bind.Joshua Ferris9/11narrativenarratologyuncannyMark FisherThen We Came to the End