‘Something Mythic’: The power of shared stories in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

Kamila Shamsie’s (2017) novel Home Fire draws on Sophocles’ Antigone for its plot, but neither requires familiarity with, nor explicitly references, the tragedy. This article attempts to build a specific case for the effects of attending to the intertext by focusing on Shamsie’s complex treatment of Antigone’s punishment and its consequences in Sophocles. Reading the novel’s denouement in conversation with that of the tragedy suggests questions about higher authority and checks on political power in the world of the novel. I argue that shared stories in the novel exert a force analogous to that of Sophocles’ gods in that they authorize moral judgments; attention to the intertext enacts the same experience for readers of the novel that shared stories do for characters within the novel.