Unreliable Narrator Research Articles

Compliance by Amie Zimmerman

Reviewed by: Compliance by Amie Zimmerman Wm. Anthony Connol (bio) Amie Zimmerman. Compliance. Essay Press, 2018. Several years ago, I found myself in the Vermont woods with the writer and intellectual Sarah Schulman. She said writers are freaks—outsiders. And that we, writers, should celebrate and cultivate this identity. Schulman told me and a smattering of other tyro artists at Goddard College's low-res MFA in Writing program that history was replete with writers as outsiders, such as The Marquis de Sade, who wrote from prison using his own excrement; like the gay, German, Jewish, poet, who wrote in idiosyncratic code during the Nazi regime; like Kathy Acker's sexual exploits upon the page at the turn of the last century. Not only does history provide us with these renegades, but writers also adopt such stances, this desire to be on the outside looking in. And, of course, forces compel some into this distinction as well. Plainly, we're a lusus naturae, as Aristotle once opined of my tribe—a people on different rungs than most others. We tend not to conform, nor comply, offered my writing mentor; we disturb, disrupt and fete differences with a zeal borne either by pure temperament or by how we've received our wounds. I gladly find Amie Zimmerman in the ranks of outsiders with the publication of her micro-essay chapbook Compliance from Essay Press. Within the chapbook, Zimmerman's a "… zealot of something" eager to perform, investigate, [End Page 248] and complicate the lingua franca of her physical and mental milieu. "We wait as hundreds of years become thousands, for the salvation, impatient; we take it into our hands & fashion the truth to conform to our experience of the decade, the year, the moment in front of us," she writes in the essay "Star." Compliance is an effort to define one's own identity as a woman while inside of the distortion of abuse and the inability to access language to name it. The quality of Compliance places her alongside the work of Selah Satertrom, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Boully, and Mary Ruefle, to name a few. What is before Zimmerman in these concise mediations is the issue of trust: trust of oneself, trust of one's own language, the veracity of memory and what this ultimately produces in terms of what we come to value and what we come to know. There are fourteen micro-essays in this chap-book, with titles like "Hip," "Table," and "Bed," and in toto reads like a perzine Ludwig Wittgenstein might have produced should he be alive and kicking today. In any interrogation of language and its uses and misuses, outsiders tend to turn first upon themselves. "Writing from the film of memory," Zimmerman begins the chapbook, her goal is to find out what is "happening…" or happened, in the topography of her body and her mind, which left a trace of some kind upon her slab of memory wax, knowing, "…I will not trust it, as I do not trust other of my memories." She must revel in the consistencies, the reversals, the reappraisals of what has been said, and what has been done in her name, to her, and in the names of others. The book seeks a sense of singular identity, but also wrestles with the ugly erasure of women in the Christian evangelical patriarchy, and the calculated removal of access to intersectional feminism, which Zimmerman posits, isolates women from each other and from their identities. She admits to being an unreliable narrator of the story unfolding, in frail memory and words limned with ash. "I will say I know & I will say I do not know & I will say my body knows & my fingers know how to hold a man & my heels know how to run & I do not know, flatness of the table under my back & I will say I know, ice cream over the edge, this language & my tongue will not release but my hand still holds the other hand…" Zimmerman writes cryptically, at times, as if in her own code, of a past unhinged, and challenging, violent and without consent. "& I will say to my body that it...

“A Major Problem for Catholic American Historians” by Edward P. Lilly, and: The Story of American Catholicism: The History of the Catholic Church in America by Theodore Maynard, and: The Story of American Catholicism by Leo F. Stock

Reviewed by: “A Major Problem for Catholic American Historians” by Edward P. Lilly, and: The Story of American Catholicism: The History of the Catholic Church in America by Theodore Maynard, and: The Story of American Catholicism by Leo F. Stock Philip Gleason “A Major Problem for Catholic American Historians.” By Edward P. Lilly in Catholic Historical Review, 24 (January 1939): 427–448. The Story of American Catholicism: The History of the Catholic Church in America. By Theodore Maynard (New York: Macmillan, 1941). Leo F. Stock, Review ofThe Story of American Catholicism, by Theodore Maynard, in American Catholic Historical Review 28 (April 1942): 94–103. The three items discussed in this note constitute something of a trifecta. None is really a classic, but they all deserve to be remembered and they have an interesting historiographic relation to each other. The first, which seemed to drop into oblivion almost immediately after its publication in 1939, is Edward P. Lilly’s article, “A Major Problem for Catholic American Historians.”15 The “major problem” in [End Page 63] question was the absence of an up-to-date survey of American Catholic history in one volume. Lilly argued that it was not possible, or even desirable, to attempt an updated edition of John Gilmary Shea’s classic four-volume work, which was, after all, a half-century old, covered nothing after 1866, labored under faulty organization, and focused too narrowly on “the physical development of the Church.” Lilly was conversant with recent trends in American historical scholarship in general, and he called attention to new currents of interest at work among American Catholic historians. But while he endorsed the need for more research, he believed that the accumulation of disparate studies, unrelated to each other or to any larger pattern of development, constituted “the fundamental weakness” of American Catholic historiography. For that reason, he insisted that the greatest need of the day was for a one-volume synthesis that would provide “a general, reliable narrative of the growth, influence and contribution of the Catholic Church in [sic] American civilization.” Almost as if on cue, the second item in this three-way combination— Theodore Maynard’s The Story of American Catholicism16—appeared two years after Lilly’s article was published. It provided just the sort of comprehensive but accessible narrative Lilly had in mind. For Maynard’s stated goal was to describe the historical development of a distinctively American Catholicism by “depict[ing], in each successive period, American Catholic activity as a whole and America as a whole, and their relationship to one another” (xii). Concentrating on this “central theme” ruled out the diocese-by-diocese approach made classical by Shea. But—presumably to accommodate those who demanded something of that sort in a church history—the book included a thirty-one page appendix setting forth basic historical data on the establishment and episcopal succession of all the diocesan and archdiocesan sees in the United States. Maynard readily conceded that he was synthesizing the research of others, but his footnoting was sparse. However, the 467 books, articles, [End Page 64] and source collections listed in the book’s bibliography testify to his wide acquaintance with the relevant literature. The main body of the work comprises twenty-nine chapters that move smoothly from the age of discovery and exploration to the two decades following World War I. He was only indifferently successful in realizing his ambitious “grand design,” but he strove earnestly to set Catholic developments in the context of the larger national scene, his knowledge of which was fairly up-to-date in terms of historiography. In his chapter on “The Frontier,” for example, Maynard noted that Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis had come under criticism by the late 1930s, calling it “now somewhat flyblown” (254). Unfortunately, his treatment of the Civil War and Reconstruction was shaped by historians of the pro-Southern “revisionist” school of thought. This led Maynard to lay most of the blame for the coming of the war on the agitation of Northern abolitionists and resulted in judgments that seem scandalous today, such as his calling the Emancipation Proclamation “a monstrous injustice” to slaveholders, and his likening the federal...

믿을 수 없는 서술의 이론적 쟁점과 신빙성 판단 과정의 윤리적 효과

믿을 수 없는 서술의 이론적 쟁점과 신빙성 판단 과정의 윤리적 효과

Evangelisk ironi

This article addresses the question whether unreliable narration, as the concept is understood in the tradition following Wayne Booth’s original definition, can occur in non-fictional stories. Contrary to Pekka Tammi’s conclusion in a recent article, this article’s answer is affirmative. It seeks to demonstrate, through a comparative analysis of respectively Mark’s and Matthew’s stories about the Canaanite woman (Mark 7:24–30 and Matthew 15:21–28), how Matthew comes forward as an unreliable narrator, and that his narrative unreliability is a function of what James Phelan has termed underreporting. The textual analysis, which leans on Gregory Currie’s and James Phelan’s theories of unreliable narration, argues that far from being more or less identical stories, as is suggested by various exegetes, Matthew’s pericope is significantly different from that of Mark. It is different both thematically and regarding the portrayal of the figure of Jesus, but also, and not least, by pursuing a more complex and daring communicative strategy based on unreliable narration and a system of multilayered irony. In concluding the theoretical discussion of unreliable narration, I suggest not only that unreliable narration is possible in non-fictional stories, but also that it is a somewhat misleading concept when applied to the kind of stories Wayne Booth normally referred to, namely fictional first-person narratives.

Genesis of a Poetics of Silence

The concept of a poetics of silence has acquired a central place in literary theory in recent decades, with unreliable narration as defined by Booth (1961) playing an important part in the conceptualisation of an aesthetics of silence. Both silence and unreliable narration are key components of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing strategy. I want to show that the poetics of silence that is so constitutive of his style was already at work at the very beginning of his writing. In order to achieve this goal, this paper studies one of Ishiguro’s first published short stories, “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” (1981), in which a first-person narrator evokes memories of her time in Nagasaki during World War II. The narrator progressively turns out to be an unreliable one, due to the unspeakability of her traumatic experience. Her reluctance to report certain facts and to express some of her feelings is emphasised by the overabundance of details provided on safer subjects. The implied reader is compelled to try and fill the text’s blanks, which themselves shed light on the gap between narrator and implied author. This short story prefigures very clearly Ishiguro’s later novels, and deals with themes dear to him: memory, family, trauma and guilt, the atomic bomb as an absent centre. It also presents a very clear picture of the genesis of his writing style, centred around a poetics of silence, both at the diegetic and narratorial levels.

Narrating Migration and Trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

Abstract Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982) represents both trauma and migration as continuous processes rather than finite stages in the life of Etsuko, the novel’s protagonist. This essay focuses on the ways in which trauma is narrated in the novel, arguing that in representing the protagonist’s life, Ishiguro mimics the narrative strategies used by trauma survivors. Written from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, the novel is a discontinuous narrative marked by indeterminacy and ambiguity, which “travels” from Britain to Japan and back, and which evinces biographical gaps and uncertainties that blur the boundary between Etsuko’s past and present, making it impossible for her to fully cross that boundary. The parallels between her life and the life of her friend Sachiko as well as her dubious narration, a consequence of creating a false version of traumatic events as a protective measure against their impact, serve to emphasize the incompleteness of both her migration and her story.

La revanche de l’auteur

La fiction se distinguerait du mensonge ou de la supercherie en étant une « feintise partagée » (Schaeffer) entre l’auteur et le lecteur, partenaires coopérants liés par un pacte de lecture où chacun respecte les règles du jeu. Pourtant, certaines fictions remettent en cause ce rapport de connivence en refusant de partager avec le lecteur le lieu ou la nature précis de la feintise qui serait dès lors non pas partagée mais plutôt dissimulée, et de ce fait non pas ludique mais sérieuse. La fiction moderne a largement exploité la figure du narrateur peu fiable comme source des erreurs, voire des mensonges desquels le lecteur tombe victime. Or, que conclure quand ce narrateur, bouc émissaire de l’auteur, n’existe pas? Nous explorerons un corpus de romans québécois où la fiction apparente est un leurre derrière lequel se dissimule le véritable lieu de la feintise, piégeant le lecteur dans des paradoxes sans issue. Ces pactes de lecture rompus ne peuvent pas être mis sur le compte d’un narrateur bouc émissaire mais plutôt sur celui de l’auteur réel — rusé, tricheur — qui s’impose comme autorité finale, tireur des ficelles non seulement du récit, mais de son lecteur.

Un « je » pour deux

Dans Moi, Sàndor F., Alain Fleischer propose une autobiographie de son oncle mort en direction d’Auschwitz. L’auteur pose en témoin d’une expérience qu’il n’a pas vécue et superpose le passé de son oncle au sien, les situe dans un même corps et un même nom. Il s’agit dans cet article d’aborder le phénomène de la non-fiabilité narrative en repérant les différents ressorts poétiques avec lesquels l’auteur accueille en son « je » deux histoires : celle de son oncle et celle du peintre Egon Schiele.

What to Read Now: Rereading Demons and The Brothers Karamazov

WHAT DO TWO LATE masterpieces by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have in common, apart from the technical fact that the action of both novels takes place in Russia in the late 1860s and early 1870s? Although their main common trait is quite evident, it goes unnoticed not only by ordinary readers but by the great majority of literary experts as well, even though it is indispensable in interpreting each of the novels. They are both narrated from the same perspective: from the point of view of a more (The Brothers Karamazov) or less (Demons) marginal character. That perspective , however, is not as simple as it usually is—and this is where the problems begin. Both Anton Lavrentyevich G. (Demons) and an anonymous narrator (Brothers) inform us—mostly firsthand—about the events they have personally witnessed. Then they provide us with secondhand accounts from various reliable sources. Thereafter the narration becomes less and less trustworthy: alleged happenings, gossip , suppositions based on general beliefs about somebody or something, etc.—all the way to the total impossibility of the two narrators having been able to learn what they are telling us. Curiously enough, both ordinary readers and literary experts very rarely, if ever, ask themselves the fundamental question: how our storytellers could have learned about events that, by their very nature, remained a total secret from everybody but the participants, who were either unable to disclose them (because, for example , they had died) or had no reason whatever to do so? The explanation for the absence of this elementary question is, of course, the literary genius of Dostoyevsky. He made the transitions from the possible to the impossible narrations so smooth, so imperceptible, that they remain invisible to all but the most attentive reader. For the rest, the mechanism of doubt that should always be triggered by an impossibility remains inactive. If you are not at the highest pitch of reading alertness, you accept what you are told by the two narrators at face value. This opens up a very important question: why did Fyodor Mikhailovich choose such a complex and ambiguous point of view in the first place, when he had at his disposal an old and straightforward narrative perspective in which there are no impossibilities of this kind—why didn’t he simply narrate his two great novels from the point of view of the omniscient narrator? Was he just experimenting with narrative perspectives for the sake of it, or did a more profound literary strategy and ambition lie behind it all? If the latter is the case, then for what higher purpose did Dostoyevsky introduce one of the greatest literary inventions of the nineteenth century: the unreliable narrator? I believe I know the answer to this question , but I wouldn’t be able to provide it here, in the very limited space that remains available to me after my long introduction . All I can give you is a hint in the form of a crucial question for each novel that hopefully should serve as an inspiration for you to reread, more attentively than before, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, and to try to decode for yourself why it was necessary —inevitable, in fact—for Dostoyevsky to tell his two great novels from the point of view of the unreliable narrator. Demons: What is the profoundly hidden motivation of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky for everything he has done? The Brothers Karamazov: Why did Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov commit suicide? Zoran Živković (b. 1948, Belgrade, Serbia) is the author of twenty-two books of fiction published in twenty-three countries, in twenty languages. With more than one hundred foreign editions, he is one of the most translated contemporary Serbian writers. Živković’s writing was featured in the November 2011 issue of WLT. Notebook what to read now Rereading Demons and The Brothers Karamazov by Zoran Živković 8 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 ...

Advancing the Narrative Policy Framework? The Musings of a Potentially Unreliable Narrator

Inspired by postmodernism and the seemingly contradictory charter of science, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) was named in a 2010 issue of the Policy Studies Journal for the purposes of understanding the role of narrative in the policy process. Since its inception we have seen a proliferation of research applications. In this issue of the PSJ you will find some of the best representatives of those applications. Studies within show a productive merging of NPF with other theories, refinement of concepts, sophisticated methodologies, and an expanding list of policy areas to which the NPF is being applied. You will also see examples of the NPF being clear enough to be wrong and—at times—being wrong. Among other observations, I argue that findings herein illuminate gaps in our understanding of narrative's role in the policy process, including a need for more refined strategy theory, a better understanding of the intersection between framing theory and the NPF, and a need to directly address the NPF's ongoing struggle to deal with varied contexts. I argue that to develop more generalizable narrative concepts that the division between interpretive and scientific approaches to the study of policy must continue to be overcome.

La poética y el bachiller Sansón Carrasco

The article presents some poetic-narratological thoughts on the function of the narrator in the 1615 Quijote. The author claims for Cervantes the invention of the “narrador infidente” (“unreliable narrator”), wrongly attributed to the American novelist Henry James. This ploy consists in guiding the reader through a series of unsuspected clues by employing statements that take advantage of the traditional confidence in the veracity of what is being narrated, but which in reality lead into error. This is a device used increasingly more often in the contemporary novel.

KAZUO ISHIGURO. THE WRITER IN THE ‘FLOATING WORLD’

Novels by the Nobel Prize winner in literature 2017 K. Ishiguro are analyzed chronologically, from the first novel A Pale View of Hills (1982) to the latest one The Buried Giant (2015). As the article shows, the author, who represents two cultural traditions, the Japanese and the British ones, reflects this quality in his works. The writer himself states that his works were mainly formed by the European literary tradition and, consequently, his novel The Remains of the Day has become a concentrated study of Englishness, one of the most vivid in contemporary British literature. Experimenting with traditional literary forms, Ishiguro uses the stream-of-conscience technique, elements of science fiction, fantasy, detective genres, but each of his novels is unique and is characterized by deep overtones. Some constant elements of the writer’s works are discussed: unreliable narrators, the opposition of memory and history, the special role of children and of old people in his novels, the significant role of periods before and after historic events that are omitted in his novels, and recognizable language and style – compact, reserved and precise.

Chick lit politics in a post-truth era: tricksters, blessees and postfeminist girlpower in Angela Makholwa’s The Blessed Girl

ABSTRACTThe possibility of an emancipated politics in chick lit novels remains a contested question among postfeminist critics. Drawing on definitions of postfeminism as a transnational sensibility, this article examines South African chick lit in relation to what has been termed post-truth or trickster politics in the context of the rise of politicians, such as Donald Trump. I read Angela Makholwa’s novel The Blessed Girl as an example of African chick lit that features a blessee narrator, a young woman who lives a luxurious lifestyle financed by older men, who is deeply influenced by a Trumpian mode of self-making. By employing a trickster aesthetic and narrative strategies, such as unreliable narration and reader address, the novel, I argue, however also unsettles established parameters of neoliberal girlpower, moving beyond its assumed anti-politicalness, as well as a simple understanding of the blessee figure through either a lens of victimhood or amorality.

The Syntax of Unreliable Narrators’ I-Utterances in ‘Gone Girl’ by G. Flynn

Unreliable narration research raises the problem of truthful information presented in fiction, which is for the most part made up. However, the truth in the fictional world is what the reader believes to be true. Therefore, deliberate deluding or confusing the reader by an untrustworthy character creates an additional fictional layer consisting of false facts. This represents the contradiction between the imaginary and the fake, the latter being untrue in terms of fiction. The paper examines how the author of the best-selling novel Gone Girl realizes her intention of deceiving or misleading the readers on the syntactic level of speech of the two main characters who are unreliable narrators. The analysis of sentence structure variety, average sentence length and syntactic stylistic peculiarities of I-utterances aims at ascertaining whether these devices and their frequency indicate that the author gives the readers a hint at the unreliability of the narration. Sentence complexity and types of clauses in composite sentences are also taken into consideration as possible signs of unreliability. As one main character is male and the other is female, the quantitative analysis of syntactic features is carried out separately to detect gender differences.

‘It is well that he does remain there’: The Importance of Joseph in Wuthering Heights

Joseph, almost without exception, is read as an object of satire and ridicule. The fact that our perception of him is filtered through the unreliable narration of Lockwood and Nelly Dean has not been taken into account. We accept that Nelly does not have the whole story about the Earnshaw and Linton families, yet, curiously when one stops to reflect, we accept uncritically her words about Joseph. This article, through tracing Nelly’s words about Joseph, reconceives him. In particular, Joseph’s reading and speaking, often used as reasons to ridicule him, are discussed as being more to his credit. Joseph is also compared with Caleb Balderstone, the servant in Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (a novel that has been compared to Wuthering Heights), to highlight more positive qualities. The article concludes that Joseph’s loyalty is the quality that matters.

L'auteur et son nègre. Figures de l'écrivain chez Delphine de Vigan

An author of best-sellers, the most successful of which is an autobiography focused on her mother who committed suicide, Delphine de Vigan has only partially obtained recognition for her work, even if her latest novel, D'apres une histoire vraie (2015), has been awarded by the Renaudot, one of the literary prizes that are authentic cultural institutions in France (v. Bourdieu, Ducas). The article analyzes the novel, whose plot, explicitly inspired by Stephen King, staged a writer and her doppelganger, who is a ghost writer by profession. Through the examination of the way the characters have been shaped, the article investigates how the writer, behind the subterfuge of a fake autobiography and an unreliable narrator, ponders about the author's identity and suggests, in a hidden strategy, how to be positioned in the French literary field and establishment.

Literary discourse

The exploration of disruption regarding the authorship and authority relationship—if there is one at all —is a beyond challenging concept; and because of this raises ontological questions. The texts The Pillowman and The Good Soldier provide an interesting scope for this investigation, as the characters are aware of themselves as authors and of the readers within the narrative. Can we ever separate authorship and authority? I will explore the disturbing effect that authority has on the relationship between text, reader and author. Clearly, the lines are blurred when regarding Cora Kaplan’s statement—“For me the greatest danger when reading a literary text is to assume that authorship and authority mean the same thing.” The factors I will discuss are: subjectivity, power relations, unreliable narration, self-conscious narrative, the meaning of art and egalitarianism and the value of names and texts. These factors appear to blur the lines between authorship and authority. The factors I chose to discuss acquired analysis and further inspection, when looking at the authorship-authority relationship.

Offenheit und Geschlossenheit als Funktionen des unzuverlässigen Erzählens. Mit Interpretationsbeispielen anhand von Texten von Ernst Weiß, Paul Zech und Stefan Zweig

Abstract The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky (Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky, 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders them without preferring one of them. He is even unable to account for, let alone to recognize the fact that these versions are contradicting each other. So, it seems impossible to determine which one of these versions is true in the fiction. The version the narrator believes to be true may be true or not. On the one hand, the narrator can be considered to be plainly unreliable; on the other hand, his unreliability is not the point of the story. It is its point that what the narrator tells us is inevitably vague; it is not its point that he lies or is not able to find out what is true in his world. – The last example stems from the novel The Poor Squanderer (Der arme Verschwender, 1936) by Ernst Weiß. In this case, the narrator’s discourse is full of single contradictions and omissions. Some of the gaps can be closed, some of them not. However, there is no explanation which accounts for the narrator’s misreporting and underreporting tout court. The overall setting of the narrator’s putative unreliability is left open due to the lack of self-awareness the narrator reveals in his discourse. – The paper closes with a short outlook on the literary/poetical difference between the closed and the open function of unreliable narration. Texts that close the gaps caused by the unreliability of their narrators display other literary properties than texts that leave the gaps, caused by the unreliability of their narrators, open. Additionally, the difference between texts whose open gaps are caused by unreliable narration and texts with similar gaps, which are not unreliably narrated, is hard to explain.

Der heterodiegetische Präsensroman – ein Fall von unreliable narration?

Der heterodiegetische Präsensroman – ein Fall von unreliable narration?

Unzuverlässigkeit bei heterodiegetischen Erzählern: Konturierung eines Konzepts an Beispielen von Thomas Mann und Goethe

Abstract Heterodiegetic narrators are not present in the story they tell. That is how Gérard Genette has defined heterodiegesis. But this definition of heterodiegesis leaves open what ›absence‹ of the narrator really means: If a friend of the protagonist tells the story but does not appear in it, is he therefore heterodiegetic? Or if a narrator tells something that happened before his lifetime, is he therefore heterodiegetic? These open questions reveal the vagueness of Genette’s definition. However, Simone Elisabeth Lang has recently made a clearer proposal to define heterodiegesis. She argues that narrators should be called heterodiegetic only if they are fundamentally distinguished from the ontological status of the fictional characters: Heterodiegetic narrators are not part of the story for logical reasons, because they are presented as inventors of the story. This is, for example, the case in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809): In the beginning of this novel the narrator presents himself as inventor of the character’s names (»Edward – so we shall call a wealthy nobleman in the prime of life – had been spending several hours of a fine April morning in his nursery-garden«). Based on that recent definition of heterodiegesis my article deals with the question whether such heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable. My question is: How could you indicate that the inventor of a fictitious story tells something which is not correct or incomplete? In answering this question, I refer to some proposals of Janina Jacke’s article in this journal. Jacke shows that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators should not be confused with the distinction between personal and non-personal narrators or with the distinction between restricted and all-knowing narrators. If you make such differentiations, then of course heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable: They can omit some essential information or interpret the story inappropriately. Heterodiegetic narrators of an invented story can even lie to the reader or deceive themselves about some elements of the invention. That means: A heterodiegetic narration cannot only be value-related unreliable (›discordant narration‹), but also fact-related unreliable. My article delves especially into this type of unreliability and shows that heterodiegetic narrators of a fictitious story can be fact-related unreliable, if they tell something which was not invented by themselves. In that case, the narrator himself sometimes does not really know whether he tells a true or a fictitious story. Such narrators are unreliable if they assert that the story is true, although they are suggesting at the same time that it is not. I call this type of unreliable narrator a ›fabulating chronicler‹ (›fabulierender Chronist‹): On the one hand, such narrators present themselves as chroniclers of historical facts but, on the other hand, they seem to be fabulists who tell a fairy tale. This type of unreliability occurs especially if a narrator tells a legend or a story from the Bible. My article demonstrates this case in detail with two examples, namely two novels by Thomas Mann: The Holy Sinner (1951) and Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943). My article also discusses some cases where it is not appropriate or counter-intuitive to call a heterodiegetic narrator ›unreliable‹: i. e. the narrator of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) and the narrator of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795/1796). On the one hand, these narrators show some characteristics of unreliability, because they omit essential pieces of information. On the other hand, these narrators are barely shaped as characters, they are nearly non-personal. However, in order to describe a narrator as unreliable, it is – in my opinion – indispensable to refer to some traces of a narrative personality: Figural traits of a narrator provoke the reader to identify all depicting, describing and commenting sentences of a narration as utterances of one and the same ›psychic system‹ (Niklas Luhmann). Only narrators who can be interpreted as such a ›psychic system‹, provoke the reader to assume the role of an analyst or ›detective‹, who perhaps identifies the narrator’s discordance or unreliability. In my article the unreliability of a narration is understood as part of the composition and meaning of a literary work. I argue that a narrator cannot be described as unreliable without designating a semantic motivation for this composition by an act of interpretation. Therefore, my suggestion is that a narration should be merely called unreliable if it encourages the reader not only to imagine the told story, but also to imagine a discordant or unreliable storyteller.