Reading Against the Algorithm: Narrative Opacity in Patricia Lockwood and Jennifer Egan

Abstract

Kawsar Ahamed

This article examines how Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (2022) make narrative opacity a formal response to algorithmic culture. Situating both novels within contemporary American literary studies, it argues that fragmentation, polyphony, and narrative gaps resist the assumption that greater informational access produces greater understanding. Drawing on literary ethics, reader-response theory, digital- culture scholarship, and Adam Kelly’s recent work on Egan and digital trust, the article shows how both novels turn uncertainty into an ethical condition that protects human experience from total computational legibility.

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