Defining the reliable narrator: The marked status of first-person fiction

Abstract

In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth first proposed the critical concepts of the reliable and unreliable narrator. Booth suggested that the notion of reliability was best defined in terms of its underlying relationship to the implied author. But this attempted linkage was never a truly secure one; and in the intervening years, a protracted debate has persisted regarding this central issue. This paper suggests that the key to resolving this debate is the formulation of a more secure definition of narrative reliability. The linguistic concept of markedness provides the critical means for doing this. Using the test case of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, five determinants of a reliable narrator in first-person fiction are suggested: a secure speaking-location back home; the use of the classical middle style of standard English; observer-narrator status; ethical maturity; and a plot structure which involves the retrospective reevaluation or Aristotelian anagnorisis of a character other than the narrator. If this much is accepted, unreliable narration may be defined in terms of a range of departures from this basic model.

Epistolary Mechanism and Unreliable Narrator in Novel by V. V. Nabokov “Once in Aleppo…”

“…Пикаро, безумец, клоун и лжецмаркированные элементы бинарных оппозиций, тогда как нейтральными или надежными рассказчиками могут быть признаны среди прочего антипод авантюрного героя, рациональный, серьезный и честный персонаж. На статус нейтральности или немаркированности в бинарных оппозициях как на основополагающий фактор для интерпретации надежности рассказчика обратил внимание Т. Мерфи, приводя в пример Ника Каррауэйа из «Великого Гетсби» [Murphey, 2012].…”