This paper provides a critical reading of the contemporary English author Ian McEwan’s third novel, entitled The Child in Time (1987). Arguing that McEwan writes to dissect and criticize contemporary culture, I offer a reading of his novel as a literary intervention into a cultural debate. In my reading, I consider the text to be a dream about certain events and characters that are the metaphoric representations of a psychic structure. More than the psyche of the author as an individual, this structure pertains to contemporary society and its predominant culture. Therefore, my purpose is not to read McEwan’s novel in order to identify his assumed repressed wishes or personal fantasies, but to analyse the narrative as a literary construct that gives us access to a societal unconscious. The nightmarish world that McEwan depicts in his fiction, in other words, is regarded as the social context out of which the individual’s self is shaped.
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