Unreliable Narrator
Johnny Lai
07659563
Narrator is the person (perspective) which is chosen by the author to tell the story (literary work, movie, play, verbal account, etc.) to the readers (audiences). Traditionally, the narrator is supposed to be reliable, since he/she/it is the only connection between the readers and the fiction world. But occasionally, authors would use unreliable narrator to be the perspective of their story. The concept of the unreliable narrator (as opposed to "author") became more important with the rise of the 18th Century. Until the late 1800s, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from that of the author.(Wikipedia) Unreliable narrator is usually adopted when the author try to create suspense to the readers, make them more critical suspicious and avoiding passive reading. To let them think in different perspectives and reconstruct the truth through their own cognitive thinking. It involves a more interactive process then the traditional reliable narrator, the readers just need to sit tight and receive everything from the narrator.
Unreliable narrators can be classified into two main categories, those cannot be fully trusted because they do not understand what they are narrating (Robert Walton) or those who are simply lying to the readers to suit their needs or justify their faults (Victor Frankenstein). In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley used unreliable narrators to tell the story, to make the readers question the truth told by different narrators and created a huge room of imagination to them. There are two narrator in Frankenstein were considered as unreliable, Robert Walton, an Arctic seafarer whose narrated his part with the letters for his
07659563
Narrator is the person (perspective) which is chosen by the author to tell the story (literary work, movie, play, verbal account, etc.) to the readers (audiences). Traditionally, the narrator is supposed to be reliable, since he/she/it is the only connection between the readers and the fiction world. But occasionally, authors would use unreliable narrator to be the perspective of their story. The concept of the unreliable narrator (as opposed to "author") became more important with the rise of the 18th Century. Until the late 1800s, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. But novels, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from that of the author.(Wikipedia) Unreliable narrator is usually adopted when the author try to create suspense to the readers, make them more critical suspicious and avoiding passive reading. To let them think in different perspectives and reconstruct the truth through their own cognitive thinking. It involves a more interactive process then the traditional reliable narrator, the readers just need to sit tight and receive everything from the narrator.
Unreliable narrators can be classified into two main categories, those cannot be fully trusted because they do not understand what they are narrating (Robert Walton) or those who are simply lying to the readers to suit their needs or justify their faults (Victor Frankenstein). In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley used unreliable narrators to tell the story, to make the readers question the truth told by different narrators and created a huge room of imagination to them. There are two narrator in Frankenstein were considered as unreliable, Robert Walton, an Arctic seafarer whose narrated his part with the letters for his
Cited: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Random House, 1992. Thripp, Richard X.. Victor Frankenstein: Trodden Hero or Veiled Villain? 2008-02-20 Narrator. (2009, May 15). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:15, May 15, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Narrator&oldid=290004399