Cognitive Dissonance and Cognitive Huge Leap in Ian McEwan’s Saturday: A Reconstruction of 9/11 Trauma

A psycho-cultural study of 9/11 attack and its pertinent trauma, reflected in Ian McEwan’s Saturday illuminates the manipulated structures of cognition and cultural identity and the way the unreliable narrators in this narrative are causing cognitive dissonance through their socio-culturally-made trauma resulted by the cognitive manipulation of the 9/11 event. The way the narrator and characters in the selected novel cope with the 9/11 attack displays the cleft Festinger refers to as the cognitive dissonance as a distasteful condition led by the awareness of inconsistencies between beliefs, attitudes, or actions. However, People inherently aspire to the consistency, so they are impelled to reduce the dissonance between what actually occurred and what has been manipulated. While through the narrations, the narrators symbolically act as history-tellers reflecting the 9/11 era, the reliability or unreliability of what they narrate should be socio-culturally investigated. Based on Festinger’s theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and Elaine Auyoung’s idea on ‘huge cognitive leaps’, the cognition of a person changes and adapts itself to sociocultural settings and events. So any narration is prone to subjectivity and subsequently not necessarily reliable.  Consequently what happens through the cognitive manipulation is meaning construction that makes narrations of cultural traumas unreliable. Thus, McEwan’s aesthetic representation of the 9/11 trauma makes the reader encounter an unreliable version of a cultural trauma, connoting the fact that the borderline between fact and traumatic fabrications is hard to distinguish due to cognitive manipulations.