Portrayal of Mental Illness: Characterization in Ian McEwan’s Short Stories (‘Homemade’, ‘Solid Geometry’, ‘Butterflies’)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article aims to examine the portrayal of mental illness in three character-narrators of the selected Ian McEwan short stories from his collection ‘First Love, Last Rites’. By taking the psychiatric diagnostic criteria as the methodical basis for the analysis, this article traces how and to what extent do characters’ actions, words and behavior correspond to the symptoms ascribed to one of the mental illnesses in question. Thus, the article explores how through the ways of direct and indirect characterization Ian McEwan creates complex images of the characters that suffer from mental illness and closely examines how such a complicated topic is reflected in the three short stories that were chosen for the analysis. Furthermore, through close reading the article attempts to show the intricate design of the characters and the stories in general, that in complex create a powerful and detailed image, and provide an angle for viewing the influence of mental illness on one’s life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".