Revisiting ‘Third-Person’ Narrative Unreliability

Taking its cue from the critical treatment given to unreliable narration by Wayne C. Booth and his early followers, and in contrast to the claims often made in the field of authentication theory, this paper seeks to join the debate on “third-person” narrative unreliability by outlining an inclusive approach to this phenomenon in which the “person” parameter need not be a determining factor. To theorize and illustrate this approach, a methodological context is first developed by juxtaposing Genette’s revisionist stance on voice and perception with Booth’s 1961 dismissal of the vocal issue and his controversial assimilation of tellers and observers. Then Ryan’s dissenting views are addressed by identifying common ground between her idea of the impersonal narrator and the principles of inclusivity which precisely rest on the impersonating potential of that figure. Finally the inclusive conception of unreliability is shown at work in three Jamesian tales – “The Aspern Papers” (1888), “The Liar” (1888), and “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) – whose different vocal options do not seem to immunize their narrators against charges of untrustworthiness.

Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down

<p>The unreliable narrator is one of the most contested concepts in narrative theory. While critical debates have been heated, they have tended to foreground that the problem of the unreliable narrator is epistemological rather than ontological: it is agreed that narrators can be unreliable in their accounts, but not how the unreliable narrator ought to be defined, nor even how readers can be expected in all certainty to find a narration unreliable. As the wider critical discourse has looked to tighten its collective understanding of what constitutes unreliability and how readers understand and negotiate unreliable narration, previously divided views have begun to be reconciled on the understanding that, rather than deferring to either an implied author or reader, textual signals themselves might be better understood as the most fundamental markers of unreliability. Consequently, taxonomies of unreliable narration based on exacting textual evidence have been developed and are now widely held as indispensable. This thesis argues that while such taxonomies do indeed bring greater interpretive clarity to instances of unreliable narration, they also risk the assumption that with the right critical apparatus in place, even the most challenging unreliable narrators can, in the end, be reliably read. Countering the assumption are rare but telling examples of narrators whose reliability the reader might have reason to suspect, but whose unreliability cannot be reliably or precisely ascertained. With recourse to David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down, this thesis proposes new terminological distinctions to account for instances of such radical unreliability: namely the ‘unsecured narrator’, whose account is therefore an ‘insecure narration’. Ballantyne’s novel, published in 1968, has not received sustained critical attention to date, though it has been acclaimed by a small number of influential critics and writers in Ballantyne’s native New Zealand. This thesis argues that the novel’s long history of neglect is tied to the complexities of its radically unreliable narration. With social realism the dominant mode in New Zealand literature from the 1930s to the 60s, the obligation of the writer to accurately render—and critique—local conditions with mimetic accuracy was considered paramount. Even those critics to have argued the novel’s importance often maintain, largely or in part, a social realist view of the book’s significance. Doing so, however, fundamentally elides the complexity of the novel’s narrative machinery and to deeply ironic ends: for, this thesis argues, Sydney Bridge Upside Down deploys its insecure narration as a complaint against the limits of social realism practised in New Zealand. Its unsecured narrator, Harry Baird, slyly overhauls realist reference points with overtly Gothic markers and cunning temporal dislocations to thus turn social realism’s desire for social critique back on itself via radical unreliability.</p>

"Where the Nightmares End and Real-Life Begins": Radical Unreliability in Sydney Bridge Upside Down

<p>The unreliable narrator is one of the most contested concepts in narrative theory. While critical debates have been heated, they have tended to foreground that the problem of the unreliable narrator is epistemological rather than ontological: it is agreed that narrators can be unreliable in their accounts, but not how the unreliable narrator ought to be defined, nor even how readers can be expected in all certainty to find a narration unreliable. As the wider critical discourse has looked to tighten its collective understanding of what constitutes unreliability and how readers understand and negotiate unreliable narration, previously divided views have begun to be reconciled on the understanding that, rather than deferring to either an implied author or reader, textual signals themselves might be better understood as the most fundamental markers of unreliability. Consequently, taxonomies of unreliable narration based on exacting textual evidence have been developed and are now widely held as indispensable. This thesis argues that while such taxonomies do indeed bring greater interpretive clarity to instances of unreliable narration, they also risk the assumption that with the right critical apparatus in place, even the most challenging unreliable narrators can, in the end, be reliably read. Countering the assumption are rare but telling examples of narrators whose reliability the reader might have reason to suspect, but whose unreliability cannot be reliably or precisely ascertained. With recourse to David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down, this thesis proposes new terminological distinctions to account for instances of such radical unreliability: namely the ‘unsecured narrator’, whose account is therefore an ‘insecure narration’. Ballantyne’s novel, published in 1968, has not received sustained critical attention to date, though it has been acclaimed by a small number of influential critics and writers in Ballantyne’s native New Zealand. This thesis argues that the novel’s long history of neglect is tied to the complexities of its radically unreliable narration. With social realism the dominant mode in New Zealand literature from the 1930s to the 60s, the obligation of the writer to accurately render—and critique—local conditions with mimetic accuracy was considered paramount. Even those critics to have argued the novel’s importance often maintain, largely or in part, a social realist view of the book’s significance. Doing so, however, fundamentally elides the complexity of the novel’s narrative machinery and to deeply ironic ends: for, this thesis argues, Sydney Bridge Upside Down deploys its insecure narration as a complaint against the limits of social realism practised in New Zealand. Its unsecured narrator, Harry Baird, slyly overhauls realist reference points with overtly Gothic markers and cunning temporal dislocations to thus turn social realism’s desire for social critique back on itself via radical unreliability.</p>

On the Margin of ”Satantango”. Some Remarks on Slow Cinema

Athough Satantango by Bela Tarr is usually regarded as a perfect representative of slow cinema and certainly deserves this reputation, it is worth remembering that it shares some features with other currents of modern cinema. Its networkish structure and unreliable narration place it close to puzzle films; its close affinity with the Krasznahorkai novel, on which it is based, makes it a form of impure – that is – hybrid cinema; due to an accumulation of evil deeds, tragic and sensational events, it resembles films of action. But, first of all, it is a paramount example of slow cinema, and as such it enables one to grasp the essential features of this genre. According to certain views, often built on the foundation of Andre Bazin theory, slow cinema imitates natural human perception and therefore is inherently realistic. This is not true, though. Instead of a reality effect, slow cinema produces rather a verfremdung effect, which in turn enhances the big potential of slow cinema in inducing transcendental or religious states in a viewer’s mind. Satantango explores this potential, drawing on the religious connotations of Krasznahorkai novel.

НАРАТИВНІ СТРАТЕГІЇ В РОМАНІ ІЛЛАРІОНА ПАВЛЮКА БІЛИЙ ПОПІЛ

The article is devoted to the analysis of narrative strategies in the debut novel of Illarion Pavliuk White Ashes. Taking into consideration the author’s intention and tracking the influence of the textual indicia on the recipient, the article aims to find out how the narration is organized and what artistic effects the author was trying to achieve. The features of retrodetective and noir as “adrenaline” genres present in the novel are analyzed. The cinematic qualities of the work as a result of the author’s intention is marked. The leading narrative strategy used in the novel, the intertextuality, is highlighted, in particular, the intertextual interaction with the story of M. Hohol Vii, and the influence of intertextems on the reader’s interpretation of the text. The phenomenon of unreliable narration is considered on the basis of the selected material and it is proved that the homodiegetic narrator, private detective Taras Bilyi, is unreliable. The strategy of using prolepsis and provoking the reader’s hesitation which is realized through the formation of doubts about the nature of the artistic convention of the events described, is also examined.

Διακρίνειν als Leseaufgabe: Petrus und Kornelius zwischen ungeschriebenem Gesetz und unzuverlässiger Erzählung

The Cornelius incident (Acts 10.1–11.18) has traditionally been read as a narrative marking the abolition or transgression of Jewish food and purity laws in early Christianity. Strong halakic statements made by Peter himself and by some of his opponents in fact seem to claim that halakic norms have been abrogated or violated. The article suggests however that these statements should not be read as accurate descriptions of facts, but instead as examples of ‘unreliable narration’: using this technique, a narrator deliberately introduces misjudgements and distorted perceptions of reality on the side of his main character in order to temporarily mislead his readers, only to unmask the deception in the later course of his narrative. It turns out that Peter's refusal of food offered in a vision as well as his halakic judgements on the ‘impurity of gentiles’ and the prohibition of table fellowship are misconceptions, based not on biblical pretexts or Jewish halakah, but purely on social convention. The narrative therefore does not describe the abolition or transgression of halakic boundaries, but invites the reader to make a proper distinction between halakic boundaries (which are to be kept) and social conventions (which in this case need to be transgressed).