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	Narrative Theory, by Ismail S Talib -- Chapter 7: The Narrator
		The first-person narrator may be unreliable: in fact s/he usually is, as he or she is supposed to be a human being (and hence fallible), and not, like the third-person narrator, merely a technical device.
		Although figural narration (see section 4) is clearly a feature of the objective third-person narration, it is is also associated, to some extent, with the limited third-person narrator, as it generally uses the pronoun ‘I’ to refer to itself less frequently than the omniscient third-person narrator.
		In the words of Margaret Drabble, who uses the intrusive narrator herself in her novels, ‘the narrator is part of the story and can intervene whenever he or she wants’.
	courses.nus.edu.sg /course/ellibst/NarrativeTheory/chapt7.htm (3782 words)

	Narrator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		This style of narrator is similar to the first person narrator, except for the notable use of the third person pronouns, he, she and it.
		An unreliable narrator is a force behind the power of first person narratives, and provides the only unbiased clues about the character of the narrator.
		To some extent all narrators are unreliable, varying in degree from trust-worthy Ishmael in Moby Dick to the severely retarded Benjy in The Sound and the Fury and the criminal Humbert Humbert in Lolita.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Narrator (1938 words)

	Unreliable narrator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		This unreliability can be due to psychological instability or other disability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader/audience.
		The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear, though a more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end, resulting in a significant realignment of the point of view from which the reader/audience thought they had been experiencing the story.
		Sometimes the narrator's unreliability is only hinted at, either at the beginning or end of the story, resulting in ambiguity in the reader/audience's mind as to how the story should be interpreted.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Unreliable_narrator (1107 words)

	Unreliable narration and the historical variability of values and norms: the Vicar of Wakefield as a test case of a ...
		Unreliable narration and the historical variability of values and norms: the Vicar of Wakefield as a test case of a cultural-historical narratology
		The relationship between unreliable narration and the norms established in a text has from the outset been an integral part of Booth's definition of unreliability: "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work [...] unreliable when he does not" (158-59).
		Later in Booth's explanation it becomes clear that the concept of unreliable narration refers to narrators who are "morally and intellectually deficient" (7) and who can be detected as such by readers based on their "mature moral judgment" (307).
	findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2342/is_2_38/ai_n14932837 (764 words)

	Connections: Fiction: Narration
		A narrator can switch perspectives or "identities" in ways that people cannot, and many authors explore the possibilities of narratives that do not allow us to think of the narrator as a single participant in the action, a consistent voice, or a unified perspective.
		An unreliable narrator presents a version of events that the reader recognizes to be slanted for some reason.
		By choosing a reliable narrator, on the other hand, an author sets out to convince us that the narrator's presentation is that of an impartial observer who shares the judgments and priorities of the implied reader.
	www.math.grin.edu /~simpsone/Connections/Fiction/Narrate/index.html (196 words)

	EDSITEment - Lesson Plan
		Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and the Unreliable Narrator
		The narration in Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" reveals at the last moment that the action in Part II took place only in the mind of the dying prisoner.
		Likewise, "My Favorite Murder" is narrated by the perpetrator of a crime; in this case, however, the narrative is largely addressed directly to the judge after a short introductory section addressed to the reader.
	edsitement.neh.gov /view_lesson_plan.asp?id=441 (2974 words)

	Unreliable Narrators
		In an extreme instance, an unreliable narrator may be identified as one whose vision is disturbed.
		The unreliable narrator may not be insane, but he may, if we take the text as 'centre', be eccentric.
		The unreliable narrator tends to be embittered (rather than disillusioned); paranoid (rather than wary); inexperienced (rather than innocent); self-absorbed (rather than self- aware).
	www2.arts.gla.ac.uk /SESLL/STELLA/COMET/glasgrev/issue3/hobs.htm (4270 words)

	Unreliable narrator
		Both Hitchcock and Nabokov made substantial use of the narrative devices of the doppelgänger and the "unreliable narrator," established in the 19th century romantic literature that heavily influenced both men.
		In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction [1]) is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability, or a powerful bias, or else simply by a lack of knowledge.
		An unreliable narrator is a character who may be giving an imperfect or incorrect account, either consciously or unconsciously.
	www.jahsonic.com /Unreliable.html (847 words)

	LISTSERV 15.0 - SCREEN-L Archives
		I suggest that three purposes of the unreliable narrator are to 1] delineate the narrator's character through the use of irony and 2] to create a sense of foreboding when we know of the unreliability and 3] to create a sense of mystery.
		They are unreliable as to both time and perception, time because the audience knows of events subsequent to the diary entries, and perception because they are grandiose and self-congratulatory.
		Unreliability is easily shown by a contrast between the spoken word and visual image.
	www.bama.ua.edu /cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9610c&L=screen-l&D=1&P=2151 (257 words)

	PEN American Center - Forum
		These wars, too, are being unreliably narrated, and could be solved, on the ground, not with skypower but with the sacrifice and determination required in all battles fighting recalcitrant enemies for worthy causes.
		What is narration but a way of selfishly appropriating what is always uncertain, always unreliable, into a structure, a crystallization of thought and perception that feels as safe and firm as my own hand upon the table.
		Its shadow in nonfiction is "liar" or "irresponsible narrator." In fiction, the unreliability of a narrator is a feature of his or her truth value as a representative of the human drama.
	www.pen.org /page.php/prmID/513 (6299 words)

	LitGloss - N (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Narrator The voice of the person telling the story, not to be confused with the author's voice.
		Often, the unreliable narrator's perception of plot, characters, and setting becomes the actual subject of the story, as in Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Narrators can be unreliable for a number of reasons: they might lack self-knowledge (like Melville's lawyer), they might be inexperienced, they might even be insane.
		An omniscient narrator is an all-knowing narrator who is not a character in the story and who can move from place to place and pass back and forth through time, slipping into and out of characters as no human being possibly could in real life.
	bcs.bedfordstmartins.com /litgloss/LitGlosscode/litgloss_n.html (669 words)

	HLHnotesarchive3
		A narrator who cannot be taken at “face value.” What an unreliable narrator says happened is interpreted differently by the implied reader as a result of the character's actions or of the reactions of other characters.
		Reliability and unreliability have nothing to do with whether or not a narrator is “likable”—it is an undermining that goes on at the level of the implied reader and implied author.
		An unreliable narrator is not necessarily lying: he or she may inadvertently mislead the reader; likewise, a narrator who “lies” to the reader or withholds information isn’t necessarily unreliable.
	www.nt.armstrong.edu /HLHnotesarchive3.htm (1578 words)

	[No title]
		Last question first: unreliable narration has been around as long as narration itself, almost; it's an integral part of Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_, for instance, insofar as we must always be on our guard against passive acceptance of the views of individual narrators; and the same goes for Homer.
		As long as narrators have been around, unreliable narration has been a narrative technique--if only because narrators, like any other character, tend to lie from time to time.
		A different kind of unreliable narration may leave us wondering, though, whether there is a stable reality underlying the tale unfolding before our eyes.
	www.seniornet.org /gallery/bookclubs/remainsrg/collateral.html (2150 words)

	pointofview
		The narrator lies only about things that matter to him/her and because the reader is able to determine his/her motive for lying, the audience is able to differentiate when the truth or a falsehood is being told.
		The objective of this exercise is to create a narrator who unwittingly reveals--through subtle signals of language, details, contradictions, and biases--that her judgment of events and people is too subjective to be trusted.
		The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself or herself than in what he or she is observing.
	olc.spsd.sk.ca /de/cw20web/pointofview/pointofviewgateway.htm (2303 words)

	Ligeia Study Guide
		The narrator says her face was incomparably beautiful, with the “radiance of an opium-dream.” Hers was a different kind of beauty—strange, irregular, not classical.
		The narrator assumed that her experiences resulted from the fever or from her response to the gloomy atmosphere of the chamber.
		The narrator becomes addicted to opium to escape (or perhaps intensify) his abnormal preoccupation with the memory of Ligeia, manifested by his continued mourning of her death.
	www.cummingsstudyguides.net /Guides2/Ligeia.html (2722 words)

	Critical Terms
		The narrator may be the protagonist (main character) of the story, may play a minor role in the plot, or may be a simple observer; however, his/her insight into the story’s action is limited to what would be possible for an individual human being in a particular situation.
		The first-person narrator may be an unreliable narrator, as individual biases and limitations affect his or her ability to interpret events.
		A form of narration in which the story is told in the third person, but the narrator conveys a sense of the internal thoughts of a character, not by quoting thoughts or speech but by adopting that character’s perspective into the narrator’s own voice.
	www.northern.edu /hastingw/terms.htm (1316 words)

	Practice questions: Point of View
		With this third-person narrator, the author usually restricts the narrator to the single perspective of either a major or minor character.
		A type of first-person narrator: a fictional character whose interpretation of events is different from the author's.
		narrator takes us inside the characters but is not a participant in the story; all-knowing.
	www.usd.edu /exam/engl210/pov.html (292 words)

	House on Mango Street Child Narrator (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		The fact that she is so young and innocent cannot reveal to us what the reality of the situation is. In truth, as the reader, we see that Ruthie seems a bit unstable and most likely mentally handicapped.
		For example if she feels confused because of something that happens because of her lack of writing skills and ability to write as an adult we may not understand what is going on either which would confuse us, as well as her.
		Another disadvantage of the child narrator is that she comes off as naïve and non-comprehending.
	www.iona.edu /faculty/dwilliams/130/childnarr.htm (527 words)

	East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New Delhi
		The fact that the narrator is a cad under the guise of being a good, loving, man invites all types of questions, the least of which is the difficulty of women to control their destinies when they are locked into a culture that does not honor them.
		Trollope's narrators are reliable: we are to accept their judgements; in the rare cases where he uses a first person, he writes satire in the Swiftian mode.
		Unreliable and reliable to a writer has nothing to do with POV (the person who will tell the story) or voice or character -- all of these are distinct literary devices/tools to the writer.
	www.jimandellen.org /gothic/EastIntoUpper1&2.html (16996 words)

	The Sword Review-Untrue Perceptions: And what we take for granted in a narrator (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		With the unreliable narrator, the author manages to reveal through subtle signals that he or she isn’t exactly the voice of truth — which is something readers often take for granted.
		The author has the narrator make a Freudian slip, admit their wrong perceptions, or otherwise show the reader through various conflicting actions and words that they are not to be trusted for the right interpretation of the events.
		I believe there is also a danger that comes from writing an unreliable narrator, and that is that he or she will lose reader sympathy, especially if the signs of unreliability are too strong.
	www.theswordreview.com /item.php?sub_id=1205 (472 words)

	The Unreliable Narrator of Job
		By describing a narrator as ‘omniscient’, critics do not usually mean to invoke theological definitions of the term.
		God and the narrator usually show their omniscience in different ways: God displays it through actions and by making predictions, but rarely by narrating a story, while the narrator tells stories in such a way as to show knowledge of all relevant factors, whether in heaven or on earth.
		The book’s execution of the technique of unreliable narration is inconsistent, however.
	web.syr.edu /~jwwatts/Unreliable%20Narrator%20of%20Job.htm (4383 words)

	The SF Site Featured Review: "Boys"
		To make myself the most reliable narrator possible, I shall, hereafter, don third person for more reliability: The initial review was written in depression, which, no doubt, affected its tone, so the reviewer sat on it for a month and half before passing it along to several intelligent male readers quite familiar with the genre.
		The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show how human beings distort or conceal the latter.
		Another point not yet fully pursued is that even assuming the narrator's unreliability, the sweeping generalizations on gender cannot be negated or denied by the text's reliability.
	www.sfsite.com /12b/ce166.htm (6021 words)

	Write On! :: Discuss the art and craft of writing
		I am very conscious of that, and am trying to write it in a way that is not dependent on accepting the political premise, while at the same time not holding back the payoff that I want to see when I am reading this type of work.
		Unreliable narrator is hard, and I don't know if I can pull it off.
		I've been playing a little bit with the unreliable narrator in my novel - not so much unreliable as everything comes in filtered through her attitude.
	www.write-on.org /story/2002/8/21/225710/210 (1111 words)

	Learn Navigation
		This applies not only to novels with an omniscient narrator, but also to those works that utilize subjective narrators in the first or third person, and even to works that sport the infamous "unreliable" narrator, one whose version of events needs to be taken with a grain or more of salt.
		This narrator is obviously not the author herself, but a special character whose job it is to relate the tale to the reader.
		An analogy to music is not inapropos: the author is the musician; the narrator is the instrument upon which the author plays; the piece of music is the "story" of the novel; and the reader is the listener, moved as much by the performance as by the music itself.
	www.infomonger.com /bbly/LearnNav.html (1662 words)

	An unreliable modern "Mariner": rewriting Coleridge in Harold Brodkey's "The State of Grace." - Brodkey's refashioning ...
		Indeed, Brodkey's reimagining of Coleridge's "Mariner" strikingly recalls Anderson's achievement in three ways: the narrator of "The State of Grace" is a grotesque; his story is a profoundly ironic psychological study; and the result, as with Anderson's two tales, is a highly effective tragicomic neo-Coleridgean parody.
		Brodkey's protagonist, a first-person narrator who remembers the adventures he had at age 13, remains nameless throughout the tale: because he doesn't care what anyone might have to say to him, this egotist never describes himself as being addressed by anybody.
		Finally, the narrator avers that "When we played, [Edward's] child's heart could come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed" by unresponsive parents would "disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard" (Brodkey 28).
	findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2455/is_n1_v31/ai_15356292 (815 words)

	Unreliable Narrator (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Unreliable Narrator the blog captured me at a remarkable time of transition.
		But back in the days of Unreliable Narrator (the original), I was still pretty straight laced.
		In the lifetime of Unreliable Narrator the blog, I lost my virginity, got drunk for the first time, and so much more; I grew leaps and bounds as a person, and seeing old me in brother was just scary.
	www.unreliablenarrator.com (1010 words)

	Images - Hitchcock/Nabokov
		Both Hitchcock and Nabokov (as well, it must be noted, as many other authors and filmmakers) made substantial use of the narrative devices of the doppelganger and the "unreliable narrator," established in the 19th century romantic literature that heavily influenced both men.
		And Scotty's vision is totally unreliable after he convinces Judy to change back into Madeleine; as she comes out of the bathroom in her clothes and makeup, she appears to emerge from a haze of green fog.
		Hitchcock and Nabokov's insistent use of the doppelganger motif and "unreliable narrator" technique reflects their common literary influences, as both of these devices were used often in the 19th century fiction they grew up reading.
	www.imagesjournal.com /issue03/features/hitchnab4.htm (1637 words)

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