Jacke, Janina

English

Journal of Literary Theory (JLT)

 1 Janina Jacke Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹ (Abstract) • Full-length article in: JLT 12/1 (2018), 3–28. The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable? As I lay out in the first section of my paper, my argumentative starting point is the observation that previous contributions to the application area discussion neglect two basic theoretical distinctions that are necessary to find robust and detailed answers to the relevant questions. The first of these theoretical distinctions will be addressed in the second section of the paper. It concerns the narrative phenomena that are usually referred to as »unreliable narration«. As I will argue, these phenomena are very heterogeneous, and we must distinguish at least five basic types of unreliability whose application areas partially differ: (1)fact-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s claims about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete, (2) fact-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s beliefs about story world facts are false or in a relevant sense incomplete, (3) value-related utterance unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative utterances are in conflict with a relevant value system, (4) value-related cognitive unreliability: the narrator’s evaluative opinions are in conflict with a relevant value system, and (5) value-related actional unreliability: the narrator’s actions are in conflict with a relevant value system. In the third section of the paper, I will then proceed to show that four kinds of narrator types have been conflated or confused in the application area debate: (a) heterodiegetic narrators: narrators who are not part of the narrated story world, (b) non-personal narrators: narrators of whom we know no features apart from them telling a story, or narrators whom we are not invited to picture, (c) all-knowing narrators: narrators who have complete knowledge of the story world facts, and  2 (d) stipulating narrators: narrators who generate the story world facts by narrating them. In discussions concerning the question of whether one or more of these narrator types cannot be unreliable, some theorists seem to assume that some or all of these types are necessarily connected. I will show, however, that there are hardly any necessary connections between them. After this preparatory work, I am showing in a step-by-step analysis in section four which of these narrators types can or cannot be unreliable in which way – and why. The results are as follows: Both heterodiegetic and stipulating narrators can be unreliable in all of the five ways outlined in section two. This outcome may seem surprising for the case of stipulating narrators. It becomes more comprehensible, however, if we bear in mind that only fact-related utterance unreliability is really impugned by a narrator’s ability to create facts by narrating them – and even here we can find a case where unreliability is very likely possible: the case of narratorial self-correction. All-knowing narrators, however, can only be unreliable in four of the five ways: It is, for conceptual reasons, impossible that all-knowing narrators are unreliable on the cognitive level with regards to the story world facts. Since they have complete knowledge of the story world facts, they cannot be wrong or ignorant about them. The case of non-personal narrators, finally, is the most complex. Here, it may first seem that non-personal narrators can never be unreliable – because as soon as a narrator is unreliable, we would know one significant feature of theirs, namely their being unreliable, which makes them personal. However, I will argue that, according to one reading of the non-personality concept, this type of narrator can in fact be unreliable on the utterance level both with regards to facts and values. This is because neither two conflicting reports by the same narrator nor the occurrence of problematic evaluative utterances in a narration – while often being sufficient for fact-related or value-related utterance unreliability respectively – necessarily invite us to picture a narrator. I am closing my paper in section five by summarizing the results and pointing to some possibly debatable theoretical assumptions on which my analyses are based.  References Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago 1961.  Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, NY/London 1978. Chatman, Seymour, Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, NY 1990.  Cohn, Dorrit, Discordant Narration, Style 34:2 (2000), 307–316.  Culler, Jonathan, Omniscience, Narrative 12:1 (2004), 22–34.  Currie, Gregory, Unreliability Refigured. Narrative in Literature and Film, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:1 (1995), 19–29.  Dawson, Paul, The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction, Narrative 17:2 (2009), 143–161.  Folde, Christian, Non-fictional Narrators in Fictional Narratives, British Journal of Aesthetics (forthcoming).  Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, Oxford 1980.  Heyd, Theresa, Understanding and Handling Unreliable Narratives. A Pragmatic Model and Method, Semiotica 162 (2006), 217–243.   3 Heyd, Theresa, The Pragmatic Perspective Revisited, Journal of Literary Theory 5:1 (2011), 3–18.  Jacke, Janina, Interpreting ›Unreliable Interpreting‹, Scientia Poetica 20 (2017), 236–265.  Jacke, Janina, Unreliable, According to Whom? New Insights into Narrative Unreliability (manuscript).  Jahn, Manfred, Package Deals, Exklusionen, Randzonen. Das Phänomen der Unverläßlichkeit in den Erzählsituationen, in: Ansgar Nünning/Bruno Zerweck/Carola Surkamp (eds.), Unreliable Narration. Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens, Trier 1998, 81–106.  Joyce, Richard, Moral Anti-Realism, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/ (20.04.2017).  Lang, Simone Elisabeth, Between Story and Narrated World. Reflections on the Difference between Homo- and Heterodiegesis, Journal of Literary Theory 8:2 (2014), 244–368.  Kindt, Tom, Unzuverlässiges Erzählen und literarische Moderne. Eine Untersuchung der Romane von Ernst Weiß, Tübingen 2008.  Köppe, Tilmann/Tom Kindt, Unreliable Narration With a Narrator and Without, Journal of Literary Theory 5:1 (2011), 81–94.  Köppe, Tilmann/Tom Kindt, Erzähltheorie. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart 2014.  Köppe, Tilmann/Jan Stühring, Against Pan-Narrator Theories, Journal of Literary Semantics 40:1 (2011), 59–80.  Lanser, Susan, The Narrative Act. Point of View in Prose Fiction, Princeton, NJ 1981.  Martens, Gunther, Revising and Extending the Scope of the Rhetorical Approach to Unreliable Narration, in: Elke d’Hoker/G.M. (eds.), Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, Berlin 2008, 77–106.  Nelles, William, Omniscience for Atheists. Or, Jane Austen’s Infallible Narrator, Narrative 14:2 (2006), 118–131.  Phelan, James/Mary Patricia Martin, The Lessons of »Weymouth«. Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day, in: David Herman (ed.), Narratologies. New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus, Ohio 1999, 88–109.  Pier, John, Metalepsis, in: Living Handbook of Narratology (2016), http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/metalepsis-revised-version-uploaded-13-july-2016 (20.04.2017).  Riggan, William, Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns. The Unreliable First-Person Narrator, Norman, OK 1981.  Ryan, Marie-Laure, The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction, Poetics 10:6 (1981), 517–539.  Ryan, Marie-Laure, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington, IN 1991.  Stanzel, Franz Karl, Theorie des Erzählens, Göttingen 1979.  Sternberg, Meir, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, Bloomington, IN 1978.  Walton, Kendall, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge 1990.  Yacobi, Tamar, Package Deals in Fictional Narrative. The Case of the Narrator’s (Un)reliability, Narrative 8:2 (2001), 223–229.      4 2018-04-06 JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 Copyright © by the author. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and JLTonline. For other permission, please contact JLTonline. How to cite this item: Abstract of: Janina Jacke, Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹. In: JLTonline (06.04.2018)  Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-003820 Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-003820 

Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹ [Abstract]

http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/download/947/2184

Unreliability and Narrator Types. On the Application Area of ›Unreliable Narration‹ [Abstract]

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Journal of Literary Theory (JLT)