Subject
Re: Unreliable narrators (fwd)
Date
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EDITOR'S NOTE. The name of Borges has also been suggested (Steven Barnat
<exnihilo@sfsu.edu>
_______________________________________________
From: anthonyk@wolfenet.com
This message was originally submitted by anthonyk@WOLFENET.COM to the NABOKV-L
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Jay, a good reference is Wayne Booth's _The Rhetoric of
Fiction_. See his bibliography section "A Gallery of Unreliable
Narrators and Reflectors". From Kingsley Amis to Virginia Woolf
and Margerite Yourcenar. Of course you will have to begin with a
discussion on what "unreliable" means and the degrees of
unreliability.
Some personal cites: the dramatic monologue in Browning,
Francois Mauriac, Sinclair Lewis, Iris Murdoch, Joyce, and...
but as I type this note, I feel like asking myself, Who _is_ a
reliable narrator?
Dickens? Balzac? Zola? Crane? Melville? Definitely not Rousseau
or Stendhal or Twain. Someone help me here, Montaigne? Hugo,
possibly, although romantically contrived. Tolstoy? I would
argue against his narrators' reliability.
Or Robbe-Grillet in which the narrator is practically
nonexistent, the novel of phenomenon? But not Nathalie Sarraute.
some thoughts,
~anthony
<exnihilo@sfsu.edu>
_______________________________________________
From: anthonyk@wolfenet.com
This message was originally submitted by anthonyk@WOLFENET.COM to the NABOKV-L
list at UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU. If you simply forward it back to the list, using a
mail command that generates "Resent-" fields (ask your local user support or
consult the documentation of your mail program if in doubt), it will be
distributed and the explanations you are now reading will be removed
automatically. If on the other hand you edit the contributions you receive into
a digest, you will have to remove this paragraph manually. Finally, you should
be able to contact the author of this message by using the normal "reply"
function of your mail program.
Jay, a good reference is Wayne Booth's _The Rhetoric of
Fiction_. See his bibliography section "A Gallery of Unreliable
Narrators and Reflectors". From Kingsley Amis to Virginia Woolf
and Margerite Yourcenar. Of course you will have to begin with a
discussion on what "unreliable" means and the degrees of
unreliability.
Some personal cites: the dramatic monologue in Browning,
Francois Mauriac, Sinclair Lewis, Iris Murdoch, Joyce, and...
but as I type this note, I feel like asking myself, Who _is_ a
reliable narrator?
Dickens? Balzac? Zola? Crane? Melville? Definitely not Rousseau
or Stendhal or Twain. Someone help me here, Montaigne? Hugo,
possibly, although romantically contrived. Tolstoy? I would
argue against his narrators' reliability.
Or Robbe-Grillet in which the narrator is practically
nonexistent, the novel of phenomenon? But not Nathalie Sarraute.
some thoughts,
~anthony