The Critical Potential of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues under the Sea” in the Postcolonial Context

Abstract

Th is text represents a postcolonial interpretation of the novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea written by Jules Verne, a French novelist. The purpose of this paper was to examine the critical potential of the said novel, as well as to indicate a means by which Verne transposed his critical thinking into the structure of colonial discourse. The aim of this text was to indicate the interaction between fictive narrative and social discourse, which Verne used to examine the issues of power and knowledge, national and ethnic matters, as well as social and political relations in the imperial world in a critical manner. The analysis of the characterization used in the novel, as well as the characters’ discourse, resulted in the dramatis personae which refl ects a critical view of worldwide social and political circumstances in the nineteenth century. By presenting an antagonistic view of the existing imperialist civilization and the new humanist society, represented by the constellation of characters, the author views the purpose of this novel as a potential attack on the growing colonial pretensions of great imperialist powers. By switching places of the colonizers and the colonized, as well as by subordinating the imperialistic reader, Verne enabled the reader to create their own experience through experience of the Other and capacitated them to reexamine the existing colonial evaluation system.