Subverting The Author-Function: Narrative Authority, Ideological Imposition, and Manufactured Innocence in Sabyn Javeri's Nobody Killed Her

Abstract

This study examines Sabyn Javeri, Nobody Killed Her, with the theory of the author-function by Michel Foucault and the difference between the narrator and the implied author by Wayne Booth to understand how narrative authority can play with accountability and redefine the views about guilt. As a result of these theoretical ideas, the article proposes the concept of manufactured narrative innocence, a narrative strategy in which confession and disclosure bring about the illusion of truth and at the same time avoids the responsibility. The study reveals that Nazneen Khan, the accused in the novel, through a close textual analysis, usurps the author-function by manipulating the discourse in which her so-called crime is construed. The results indicate that three interrelated formal operations can be used to create such manufactured innocence: the address to the second person, which suppresses other viewpoints and provides Nazneen with a full narrative control; ideological justification, which redefines the assassination as a moral necessity by showing the political failures and betrayals of the victim; and the confessional mode, which admits guilt and erases its legal and moral implications. Consequently, the novel shows that narrative power can destroy the institutional processes of justice and lead to the accused shaping the meaning of the events and, in effect, writing her own acquittal. The paper finds that manufactured narrative innocence provides a useful new way of examining politically charged confessional fiction where discourse itself is used as an instrument of evading responsibility.