12/5/2023 0 Comments Unreliable narrator![]() ![]() Phelan identifies six types of unreliability which fall into two larger categories: (1) misreporting, misinterpreting (misreading) and misevaluating (misregarding) (2) underreporting, underinterpreting (underreading), and underevaluating (underregarding). In light of these three roles, Phelan classifies unreliability by focusing on three axes: the axis of facts the axis of values or ethics and the axis of knowledge and perception, the last having received less attention from Booth than the other two axes. ![]() Phelan points out that narrators “perform three main roles-reporting, interpreting, and evaluating sometimes they perform the roles simultaneously and sometimes sequentially” ( 2005: 50). While Booth focuses on the narrator’s misreporting and ethical misevaluation, Phelan refines and extends Booth’s distinction of kinds of unreliability (Phelan & Martin 1999 Phelan 2005). If the reader discovers unreliability as encoded by the implied author for the purpose of generating irony, she/he experiences a narrative distance between the narrator and the implied author, and a secret communion occurs between the latter and the reader behind the narrator’s back (300–09). In Booth’s view, a narrator is “ reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” ( 1983: 158–59). Booth discusses unreliability in relation to the concept of the implied author (Schmid → Implied Author Shen ( 2011, 2013) and to that of narrative distance. The concept of unreliability was proposed by Booth ( 1983), who was concerned with intentionally encoded unreliability in fiction. Only occasionally is this due to the author’s own slips or failings in contrast to non-literary narratives, where narratorial unreliability is more often a result of the author’s own limitations. In literary narratives, narratorial unreliability is usually encoded by the author as a rhetorical device. If a narrator misreports, -interprets or -evaluates, or if she/he underreports, -interprets or -evaluates, this narrator is unreliable or untrustworthy. In its narratological sense, unreliability is a feature of narratorial discourse.
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