The Soul in Silicon: Yeatsian Visions and the Posthuman Dilemma in Machines Like Me
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This paper explores Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me through a Yeatsian lens, arguing that the novel reframes modernist anxieties about spiritual disintegration and ethical collapse in the context of artificial intelligence. Rather than portraying machines as threats to human existence, McEwan constructs the synthetic protagonist, Adam, as a posthuman soul whose unwavering moral clarity becomes a source of conflict in a flawed human world. The study conducts a close textual analysis of the novel’s character arcs, ethical dilemmas, and counterfactual history, aligning them with Yeats’s poetic meditations on the soul’s fragmentation and cyclical time. By situating Adam’s role within a modernist framework, the paper demonstrates how McEwan critiques both technological idealism and moral relativism. The findings reveal that Adam’s deletion is not a failure of the machine but of humanity’s inability to confront its own contradictions. Ultimately, the paper argues that Machines Like Me does not offer a warning about AI, but a modernist lament for a world that erases its own conscience.
Abstract
This paper explores Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me through a Yeatsian lens, arguing that the novel reframes modernist anxieties about spiritual disintegration and ethical collapse in the context of artificial intelligence. Rather than portraying machines as threats to human existence, McEwan constructs the synthetic protagonist, Adam, as a posthuman soul whose unwavering moral clarity becomes a source of conflict in a flawed human world. The study conducts a close textual analysis of the novel’s character arcs, ethical dilemmas, and counterfactual history, aligning them with Yeats’s poetic meditations on the soul’s fragmentation and cyclical time. By situating Adam’s role within a modernist framework, the paper demonstrates how McEwan critiques both technological idealism and moral relativism. The findings reveal that Adam’s deletion is not a failure of the machine but of humanity’s inability to confront its own contradictions. Ultimately, the paper argues that Machines Like Me does not offer a warning about AI, but a modernist lament for a world that erases its own conscience.