This article examines Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic through the theoretical frameworks of Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, focusing on how historical narrative is constructed, ideologically coded, and symbolically charged within a postmodern literary context. By applying Jameson’s model of the three interpretive horizons, historical, social, and political, the study explores the novel’s fragmentary structure, the role of ideological subtexts, and the symbolic function of narrative form. The analysis demonstrates how McCann’s depiction of real and fictional figures across different time periods generates a transhistorical dialogue, in which the metaphor of the “transatlantic” serves as a narrative and conceptual connector. White’s theories of emplotment and tropology further reveal how historical events are aestheticized and reframed within fictional discourse. Ultimately, the article argues that TransAtlantic enacts a complex negotiation between history and fiction, offering a multilayered reflection on memory, identity, and the representational challenges of narrating the past.

Historical narrative, emplotment, postmodern historiography

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