Anthropocenic Affects and Ethics in Aaron Thier's Mr. Eternity

In the discourse on ecological mourning, “the vulnerabilities [of marginalized groups] to climatic and environmental change” and the resulting ecological grief are often ignored or absent, because, as Ashlee Cunsolo points out, these marginalized bodies “do not usually matter within policy and discourse” (2017, p. 181). Similarly most climate change fiction focuses on (future) Western protagonists and all but ignores the people—predominantly in the global South—who are already experiencing climate change in their day-to-day lives. This links to arguments against the use of the term “Anthropocene”: as, amongst others, Jason W. Moore (2016) and Manuel Marias Aldonado point out, the term erases the profound differences in responsibility and affectedness between people, because of its underlying notion of a universal humanity that implicitly uses Western people as a pars pro toto. Mr. Eternity (2016) by Aaron Thier, however, is a climate change fiction comedy that literally decenters the Western protagonist, and thereby his story and his experience, by making him a character in the stories of marginalized character-narrators that Western history usually silences, while at the same time highlighting the pervasiveness of the Western worldview. The novel consists of five alternating autodiegetic narratives set in 1560, 1750, 2016, 2200, and 2500 in several locations on the American continent. The title character, a mariner who lives for over a thousand years and goes by (various spellings of) the name Daniel Defoe, recurs in every story. Defoe's superhuman lifespan, in other words, roughly corresponds with the era of capitalism and allows him