If The Past Comes In It Will Wring Her Neck: Eimear McBride's Strange Hotel Show Notes [Part Two]
Cordelivres Club Episode Five Show Notes
This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of our Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast; check out the episode if you haven’t yet—it’s free!
And there’re a couple photos of my edition down below.
Let’s get into it!
(Even More) Modernist Narration in Strange Hotel
In this episode we continue our discussion of Eimear McBride's novel Strange Hotel, focusing on its Modernist narrational approach wherein the reader's experience mirrors the characters' isolated and traumatic journey through both her peripatetic hotel-based voyages and her own haunting past. In the novel's second half we’re given more about the protagonist's past relationship and memories, via our third-person present tense narration, which effectively conveys her status and strained, to say the least least, emotional state. We look some more at Mcbride's skillful use of language and focus on a specific passage where the protagonist envies others' belief in an approaching future.
Narrative Techniques in Protagonist's Memory
One très cool maneuver used in Strange Hotel is McBride’s method of gradually revealing—or, rather, pulling out—our heroine’s memories throughout the story arc. In the episode we very profoundly compared this approach to the scene from Seinfeld where Elaine is trying to save three seats at the movies, fighting everyone off before finally giving up. Similarly, the narration circles ever closer—we also invoked the image of a pack of hyenas (that’s how hyenas work, right?)—until, eventually, the protagonist’s resistance to sharing memories is broken through, after holding them back for 60-70 pages. This type of narrational changing-speeds is critical to novel-length work; we (somehow, again), mentioned The Great Gatsby as an example of a novel with conventional first-person narration that still varies in its storytelling (narrational) approach.
McBride uses what we call “pseudo-immersive memory” to bring memory to the fictive present, relying on vivid, multi-sensory language and the protagonist’s struggles with her past to emphasizing a building of tension and eventual climax through a shift in narration rather than traditional plot progression. Her search for some respite, amidst her wanderings, reminds a bit of classical itinerant figures such Odysseus or Aeneas. The character's past decisions and current situation are, we learn, tied in to her careful management of her personal life and relationships—and the way we learn about it all. These techniques, again, collectively create a reading experience that mirrors the protagonist's isolation and disconnection as she travels between hotels, making readers work through dense prose just as the character struggles through her experiences. That’s the core of this novel’s compositional success.
A nice touch to this book is the way in which he various hotels function as liminal spaces where the protagonist can maintain emotional detachment from her past trauma and lost relationships. As in Part One, we look at how these spaces create a "suspended animation" that mirrors her internal state with the readerly experience. The protagonist's movement between hotels worldwide (from Auckland to Oslo to Austin) physically manifests her attempt to outrun memories while paradoxically searching for something.
A few brilliant lines bring this out— "It is the farthest furthest she has ever been" (Auckland); “One could—in the main—eat dinner off the manner in which she’s conducted her sex life”—suggesting both physical and emotional distance. The hotel rooms become containers for memory that the protagonist both avoids and confronts; spaces where her carefully maintained emotional barriers gradually break down.
The metaphor culminates in "The Imagined Room" section, which we talk about towards the end, where the hotel setting transforms into a psychological space where past and present collapse together, forcing confrontation with what she's been avoiding throughout her travels.
As a foundational architecture, the narrational structure of Strange Hotel reflects the protagonist's psychological state - initially keeping memories at bay through controlled, stylized language, then gradually allowing those memories to "chip in" until they finally break through completely in the last section, where the narration dramatically shifts from third-person to first-person. As we talked a bit about last week, this shift embodies the character's ultimate inability to maintain emotional distance from her past despite her attempts to "stop fucking around with language."
Perspective and Point of View
The discussion also focused on broader bits of literary analysis, specifically the distinction between perspective and point of view in narration. We look at my own use of these terms, defining perspective as the character(s) whose thoughts are revealed, while point of view refers to the technique used to render that interior life. This becomes central to Strange Hotel’s narrative style, and we look at its shift to first-person POV for the final 15-20 pages, discussing how the narration takes on the character's voice through an advanced understanding of mind-style.
This last section, titled "The Imagined Room,” features first-person syntax to achieve an immersive exploration of memory. The abrupt transition from third-person to first, after 120 pages, culminates in a significant narrative twist and a flood of first-person revelations. There’s a bit of Molly Bloom here, although this was left as an open point for future discussion.
Stream of Consciousness in Literature (Part One of…Many)
We close with a fairly brief foray into stream of consciousness narrational techniques, looking at its role as a third-person, rather than first person, school of methods. True stream of consciousness involves total immersion in a lived space—which is not what we have here. We’ll definitely be getting into that in future episodes, but for now we attempted something of an overview vis-a-vis Strange Hotel.
The close of the novel, despite this grammatical shift, isn't a true first-person narrative but rather a close approximation that allows the narrator to inhabit the character's interiority. McBride uses this technique to explore the limitations of language and the tension between maintaining distance and revealing the story's underlying themes, paying off that grand narrational arc that begins in the first hotel scene—the seats in the movie theater have finally been given up.
Ultimately McBride’s command of elliptical language and composition creates a compelling character study, despite limited character information, and stands as an important example of Modernist novelistic approaches. Let’s hope that her future work continues in this direction, as Strange Hotel is a very cool novel.
Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.
À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.
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