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Eça de Queiroz's short story "Singularidades de uma rapariga loira" represents a breakthrough both in mode of narration and in subject. Distancing himself from idealizations of romantic love, Eça constructed a narrative that attempted to sustain his vision of modernization, colonialism, and their impact on affective life. To my knowledge, readings of "Singularidades" have so far entirely overlooked its allegory of Portugal's colonialism, and its silencing postures, especially regarding the slave trade. The past of Macário, the story's protagonist, in the South Atlantic is often dismissed; in my reading, it is an essential aspect of the story's innovation. Paying attention to Macário's past also allows one to uncover Eça de Queiroz's layered storytelling style and opinions on colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day delves into the intricacies of memory, self-deception, and denial through the lens of its protagonist, Stevens, a devoted butler. This article meticulously examines the interplay of these themes within the novel, elucidating their profound impact on Stevens’ identity and worldview. By meticulously dissecting Ishiguro’s narrative, the paper elucidates how memory functions as a tool for constructing personal narratives, particularly evident in Stevens’ selective recollection of events to maintain his idealized butler persona. Furthermore, it explores Stevens’ unwavering commitment to duty, which leads to his blindness towards his employer’s moral failings and the subsequent isolation and regret he faces. Through a comprehensive analysis, this paper argues that Stevens’ self-deception and denial emanate from a quest for dignity and purpose, underscoring Ishiguro’s critique of sacrificing integrity for societal conformity. Moreover, it elucidates how Ishiguro’s exploration resonates with broader philosophical discourse on memory, identity, and ethical considerations, accentuating the imperative of acknowledging past errors for individual growth and societal advancement.

Midst is a semi-improvised sci-fantasy podcast, which is promoted for its unreliable mediation via three anonymous voices. The three narrators weave their story of a frontier planet caught between two contrasting sides of a fictional cosmos by continuously omitting descriptions, changing details, contradicting their statements, and questioning each other's authority. The uttered word is presented as flexible and bound to shift, bend, and be entirely negated, along with everything that can be assumed about Midst's fictional world. This paper will inquire how such a podcast can nonetheless produce a cohesive narrative by identifying and exploring infrastructural formations that permeate the auditive experience. It will suggest that its various forms of infrastructures are essential means of meaningmaking, that work with and through Midst's innate heterogeneity and paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a literary analysis of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (1999), the article explores the theme of indeterminacy and gaps in the text and their impact on readers' interpretation. Drawing on the concepts of Iser's implied reader, Kukkonen's embodied reader, and Abbot's acceptance of unknowability, the article reveals how Munro engages readers in constructing hypotheses and continuously challenges them by introducing new insights, prompting revisions of interpretations. By exploring the deliberate indeterminacies in Munro's narrative, this study aims to elucidate the interplay between authorial intention and the reader's interpretive agency. The article also mentions the film adaptation of Munro's short story by the Canadian director Sarah Polley, Away from Her (2006), and highlights the use of indeterminacy within the visual medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mortality is one of the aspects of the cycle of life that are feared by humans since it is inevitable. This article investigates Kazuo Ishiguro's work entitled Never Let Me Go, a dystopian novel set in England in a fictional world in the 90s, further. The novel tells the story of a woman named Kathy H. and is told from her perspective and highlights her life’s story growing up at a private school called Hailsham. The novel is analyzed using close reading through the lens of mourning and melancholia as well as the concept of memory. Kathy H.'s narrative of remembering and retelling past events is something that is emphasized in this study. It can be gathered that Kathy H.'s narration of remembering and retelling events in her past as an unreliable narrator and as a clone reveals herself as an individual and that telling her story is her way of coping with all the losses she experienced throughout her life and her way of accepting and mourning her own impending death.

The paper focuses on Akutagawa’s story “In a Grove” and examines it through the framework of literary modernism and the concepts of traditional Japanese aesthetics such as traditional images of ghosts and women in tales and fables of old Japan. The paper studies the motif of ultimate truth and the search for it as well as the impossibility to find it as distinctive features of modernism. It analyzes compositional features of the story, examines the origins of the plot and the possible literary influences. The paper deals with the change in the situational and psychological roles of the main characters and addresses the use of the fantastic as a writing technique, proving that said elements underscore the sense of uncertainty in the unknowable world. A unique narrative is created, and it surpasses the modernist strategies, marked by epistemological uncertainty, which is simultaneously the characteristic feature of Japanese literature of the twentieth century, with its ambiguous attitude to truth, reality and fantasy.

The paper focuses on Akutagawa's story "In a Grove" and examines it through the framework of literary modernism and the concepts of traditional Japanese aesthetics such as traditional images of ghosts and women in tales and fables of old Japan. The paper studies the motif of ultimate truth and the search for it as well as the impossibility to find it as distinctive features of modernism. It analyzes compositional features of the story, examines the origins of the plot and the possible literary influences. The paper deals with the change in the situational and psychological roles of the main characters and addresses the use of the fantastic as a writing technique, proving that said elements underscore the sense of uncertainty in the unknowable world. A unique narrative is created, and it surpasses the modernist strategies, marked by epistemological uncertainty, which is simultaneously the characteristic feature of Japanese literature of the twentieth century, with its ambiguous attitude to truth, reality and fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a pragmatic stylistic analysis of Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novel The Good Soldier, assessing the technical notion of 'cooperation' developed in Gricean theory as a means of explaining its distinctive narrative style. Critics have generally agreed this text offers a salient example of unreliable narration, but have differed significantly in how they judge the character of the narrator himself, and even in how they interpret the events of the novel. Grice characterises communicative exchanges as typically rational pieces of behaviour, in which a mutually accepted set of purposes guarantees that individual contributions are suitable and constructive, but he does also detail ways in which speakers may fail to fulfil these expectations. This article will analyse examples from the novel in which the relationship between narrator and reader might be characterised as uncooperative in specifically Gricean terms; the narrator faces a clash of conversational maxims, opts out of the maxims or violates them, rather than either adhering to them or flouting them for communicative effect. This suggests a way in which pragmatic literary stylistics might be able to offer a principled explanation of the idiosyncratic style of this canonical work of modernist fiction, and by extension of the effects of this style of narration on the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores “crime” as cultural and not simply an individual act. The aim is to contextualize a transgression as an outcome of a social “phenomenon” that happens in real-time, is reported in the newspaper and TV documentaries, and is adopted for analysis as a “crime fact story”. Using a “discourse-based” frame analysis of the non-linear narrative characteristic of offender engagement discourse, I reorganize the narrator’s experience. Secondly, in the narrative act of the “double function” of a narrator as a character, I reveal an “unreliable” stance when the narrator, like the transgressor, is the victim of the interpretations the actors make of their surroundings in the 1st story of crime. In reorganizing the narrator’s experience, there are “microcontexts” which, as alternative storyworld, emulate the causes leading to the transgression left unnarrated in the 2nd “story of investigation”. Consequently, a “perpetrator-culture” nexus is conceptualized in the dichotomy of social factors and criminal behaviour, which is a phenomenon and represented as antecedentless pronouns and inanimate nouns in the text, stylistically “repeated” for emphasis in the discourse. The paper emphasizes the need to consider the impact of factors that influence society and inform deviance within a context of “culture” that is of shared value and behaviour and situates an offence to the interpretations the actors cognitively make of their surroundings.

This article reinterprets the alleged self-portrayal of the early modern author Michael Lindener (* between 1520 and 1530, † 1562) in his Schwanksammlung Katzipori (1558) by revealing its fictional character. Scholars read the text as the autobiography of a morally despicable bon vivant. Against this line of interpretation, this article proposes a radical distinction between author and narrator, showing how Lindener ironically undermines the well-established canon of poetical rules of his time while portraying himself as the mischievous libertine Compan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the landscape of contemporary Nigerian literature, the debut novel of Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018), stands out for its blend of black humour, ethical aspersions, denouncement of patriarchal violence, and unreliable narration. Readers are bound to sympathize with two criminal sisters, despite the decidedly thorny situation they are immersed in: stunning Ayoola inadvertently kills her boyfriends and connives with her sister Korede, a nurse who effectively disposes of the corpses. This article will revisit some considerations of entropic humour and comic distance with a view to demonstrating why the sisters are granted a redeeming opportunity. Additionally, it will examine the effects of domestic trauma – mainly from an African-centred perspective – and a possible fictional unlearning of patriarchal narratives. Finally it will focus on the role of the narrator's unreliability in order to underscore the additional ironical undercurrents of the novel's layered plot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores "crime" as cultural and not simply an individual act. The aim is to contextualize a transgression as an outcome of a social "phenomenon" that happens in real-time, is reported in the newspaper and TV documentaries, and is adopted for analysis as a "crime fact story". Using a "discourse-based" frame analysis of the non-linear narrative characteristic of offender engagement discourse, I reorganize the narrator's experience. Secondly, in the narrative act of the "double function" of a narrator as a character, I reveal an "unreliable" stance when the narrator, like the transgressor, is the victim of the interpretations the actors make of their surroundings in the 1st story of crime. In reorganizing the narrator's experience, there are "microcontexts" which, as alternative storyworld, emulate the causes leading to the transgression left unnarrated in the 2nd "story of investigation". Consequently, a "perpetrator-culture" nexus is conceptualized in the dichotomy of social factors and criminal behaviour, which is a phenomenon and represented as antecedentless pronouns and inanimate nouns in the text, stylistically "repeated" for emphasis in the discourse. The paper emphasizes the need to consider the impact of factors that influence society and inform deviance within a context of "culture" that is of shared value and behaviour and situates an offence to the interpretations the actors cognitively make of their surroundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) is the property of Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Litera: Journal of Language, Literature & Culture Research is the property of Litera: Journal of Language, Literature & Culture Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Witness and testimonial literature have gained special significance in the 20th century in response to the traumas that people experienced then. Two dystopian novels by Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments, are also classified as such, even though they are set in the fictitious Republic of Gilead in the near future. In both cases, the story is told by a first-person narrator, unreliable by default, but still able to bear witness to the events. In the first novel, the narrator is trapped by the circumstances, but still looking back to the pre-Gilead times. Her tale is her means of survival. In the second novel, the narrating voice is splintered into three distinct ones - one of the architects of the system, a girl raised in Gilead and an outsider, travelling south but unable to fully grasp the reality there. Once the four voices intertwine, the picture of the regime takes the form of her-story. The aim of the paper is to analyze the way in which the four narrators in the two novels perceive the regime and how they deal with the trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the peculiarities of literary translation of the texts where the story is told by an unreliable narrator. This relatively new way of narration has not been properly considered yet, as well as the criteria of an unreliable narrator and the translation strategy that should be chosen while translating such fiction. The paper discusses the features of this literary device, its functions and the ways of its linguistic representation. The paper is based on the novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by M. Haddon and its translation into Russian made by A. Kukley in 2003. The comparative analysis of the source and target texts focuses on the stylistic peculiarities of the novel and the language personality of the unreliable narrator. The paper reveals the following challenges that a translator can deal with: the formation of a speech profile of the narrator, the translation of colloquial vocabulary and the translation of realia. Each example that includes an extract from the original book and its translation shows the features of the narrator’s speech profile; these features can have an impact on the translation and thus, should be taken into consideration throughout the whole process of translating. The analysis touches upon the examples representing inadequate translation, and for this reason, an alternative variant, the most relevant one and conveying the idea of the author of the original book is provided. The authors make a conclusion about the best translation strategy to be used while dealing with literary texts told by an unreliable narrator.

The paper comments on our new translations of E.A. Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Black Cat” (1843). The introductory section reviews retranslation theories since the birth of the so-called Retranslation Hypothesis. We consider Lawrence Venuti’s idea of retranslation as best fitting our strategy. According to his point of view, each retranslation is, in fact, a reinterpretation. Besides correcting or debating other translations of Poe, we preserved what we thought to be insightful and eloquent in them. Our major objective was to retain the cognitive obstacles, the contradictory meaning of Poe’s prose, rather than to avoid its ambiguity, discrepancies, and repetitiveness. The non-native reader’s verdict, his or her assessment of the narrators’ sanity at the moment of crime and the validity of their post-crime narratives, would largely depend on the translator’s effort to savor both gothic undertones and numerous indications of mental instability in Poe’s tales. Such indications allowed numerous critics to diagnose the narrators with a variety of mental disorders. Another goal of our translations was to savor a distinctiveness of Poe’s prose, its affectiveness – the diction and phrasing of the oral spontaneous speech of “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrator and the penned account given in “The Black Cat”. We made it a point to preserve where possible the authorial syntax and punctuation i.e. the numerous dashes, as well as italicized words and phrases, in order to project a tone of voice and sketch the psychological contours of the characters, especially that of the first narrator, whose pathological reactions could be caused by external or delusory sensory overload.

The present study intends to examine the reconstruction of truth through unreliable narration in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (2011). In the process of seeking a fiction in which the narrator is manipulated by the authorial voice to self-refutation, it finds Barnes’ fiction to the purpose. As such, we contend that Barnes resorts to unreliable voices to make his readers suspect the truth of his narrative. In addition to the unreliability of the narrator, the reader is also aware of a cunning voice that is not present in the fiction as the voice commenting on the narrator’s words, but as a scheming intelligence distorting the narrator’s integral sequence of events. This study wants to argue that such a voice can itself be established within the novel as unreliable. To this end, a narratological analysis will be conducted in two stages. The first will focus on the level of the story, mainly on the position of the narrator, to suggest that the narrator gives us three main reasons to doubt his reliability: his age, dementia, and addiction to alcohol. The second stage is going to concentrate on the level of the text to examine the role of the implied author. It will ultimately show that the implied author is an unreliable voice that further twists the narrator’s accounts.

The paper reviews various interpretations of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald in both Russian and American critique. A conclusion is made that the idealization of the protagonist is the result of a long tradition of treating Jay Gatsby as both a victim of circumstances and a romantic dreamer. The social context of the time and the place is not adequately assessed, although it determines the character of the central figure of the novel. Fitzgerald’s famous book not only renders the charm of the Jazz Age, but reveals the seamy side of American life in the 1920s. American press of that time was full of news of mafia wars, racket, money laundering, bootlegging, wide-spread corruption of politicians closely connected with the criminal world. The echo of these events is quite audible in “The Great Gatsby”. The paper is, in fact, an enquiry aimed at revealing the real character of Jay Gatsby. It traces his evolution – from a penniless officer who after returning from Europe to New York City agreed to work for the mafia – one of the leaders of a criminal gang. The combination of artistic imagination and historic facts requires an untraditional analysis – searching for clues, juxtaposing facts and dates, checking the words of witnesses and weighing different versions of events described in the novel. The quality and exactness of translation also come under scrutiny: the translation of the novel made by E. Kalashnikova sometimes deviates from the original, which does not help the reader to get an adequate idea of Gatsby’s true nature.

Copyright of Études de Stylistique Anglaise is the property of Societe de Stylistique Anglaise and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (TGS) by Ford Maddox Ford is one of the earliest examples of the Modernist Period in English Literature. Written in 1915 and set just before the Great War, the novel is about two couples, an aristocratic English couple (Edward and Leonora Ashburnham) and a wealthy American couple (John and Florence Dowell), who meet at a spa in Nauheim, Germany in 1904. John Dowell, as the involved first-person narrator, tells the story that revolves around Edward’s and Florence’s inability to remain faithful to their partners, Edward’s love affair with several women, Edward’s refusal to give up his idealized dream of living as a Victorian gentleman, and John Dowell’s struggle with how to interpret and narrate all these events. Although the themes of the novel are like typical Victorian issues, unlike its Victorian predecessors, the novel lacks omniscient narration and depends on frequent shifting of emotional impressions and views of its narrator. Thus, what makes the novel interesting and its interpretation difficult is the unconventional narrator who brings impressionistic storytelling into play as a narrative technique, and who, for the readers, offers this method as an alternative to changing social order, personal integrity and conventional novel form. The aim of this paper is to discuss how Dowell’s unreliable narrative technique creates a mimetic illusion which makes the reader an active participant in Dowell’s writing of the story.

Proust's most famous critic claims that he didn't have "even a vague or confused idea" of how his novel was going to hang together. Others tell us that every statement in the novel is a "transient hypothesis," that Proust has "made up his mind about nothing," or even that Proust thinks he himself is "mad" for believing that art has the power to trans- figure reality. This paper will explain why none of that is true. As is clear from his essays, his letters, and even his actions, Proust was not an "essayist," in the Musil sense: not someone, that is, whose assessments were always tentative and provisional, ready to be relinquished at any moment. At least when it comes to the relationship between selfhood, style, and art, Proust had a set of pretty robust beliefs; and those same letters, along with elements of the novel itself, also show that he wasn't flying without instruments. So why have some critics thought otherwise? Perhaps, in part, it's because they have assumed the narrator always speaks for Proust. If so, their foundational assumption isn't just mistaken; it's also likely to prevent the novel from doing some of its most important work on us, a work not of deconstruction, and not simply of didacticism, but of self-understanding, formal modeling, and habit cultivation, all in the service of a better life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Submission (2015), a novel in which a Muslim political party is elected to govern France, has been widely interpreted as part of a ubiquitous discourse of "declinism" in contemporary French intellectual culture. The novel has been accused of complicity with a reactionary politics favoring a return to strong patriarchal authority and national pride, while the narrative of the triumph of political Islam is frequently interpreted as a thinly veiled act of Islamophobia. This ideological interpretation is, however, complicated by the bad faith of the novel's unreliable narrator, and by the ironic treatment of his narrative voice. By taking the elusiveness of this narration more fully into account, it becomes possible to read Submission as a tentative--if never unambiguous-- narrative of religious conversion. To this extent, the treatment of Islam in Submission can be seen as consistent with the persistent but ambivalent role of religion in Houellebecq's wider work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Selçuk University Journal of Faculty of Letters is the property of Selcuk Universitesi Edebiyat Fakultesi Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article the Liar's Paradox is examined in reference to Dostoevsky's novel Notes from the Underground (1864). First the concept of unreliable narrator is discussed and examined within the genres of autobiography and 'confession', where the narrator not always tells the truth but sometimes intentionally lies in order to obtain the reader's sympathy and admiration. Then the narrative strategies of the Man from the underground are analyzed and a series of "extreme" narrative devices (Richardson 2006) are identified, such as "epanorthosis", "denarration", "disnarration". All of these narrative devices realize verbally the Liar's paradox which traps the Man from the Underground into a vicious circle from which it is impossible to exit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to analyse the predominating narrative unreliability in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) within the framework of rhetorical narratology with a specific focus upon the notion of subjectivity. The homodiegetic narrator, the ageing butler Stevens, is far from fitting unproblematically into the definition of unreliable narrator. The exploration of the employment of narrative unreliability in the novel must, therefore, be aligned with central themes like the national identity and Englishness precisely because it is through Stevens's narration that these grand narratives can be revealed as fiction. What is at issue in the novel is also the very act of narration itself, which is problematized as evasive, nonauthoritative, repressed, and obfuscating. Stevens's narration is profoundly retrospective, looking backwards not only to retrieve the past memories of 'great' days in the service of Lord Darlington, but also to base his own subjectivity upon this 'greatness'. In this respect, by dealing with various functions of the use of an unreliable narrator in The Remains of the Day, it is possible to come up with certain implications of Stevens's unreliability that is rendered manifest by means of evasion or repression of narration, fallibility of memory, and disintegration of subjectivity and national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reconsiders Gower's "Virginius and Virginia" (Confessio Amantis , 7.5131–306) and Chaucer's Physician's Tale , along with modern interpretations of them, in the light of the relation between medieval narrative and modern narrative theory. It argues that neither narrative has a fictional narrator, that the narratorial I of the Physician's Tale is best understood as Chaucer, and more generally that application of the modern concept of the unreliable narrator to medieval narratives is unhistorical and distorting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper considers the narratological phenomenon of unreliable narration in the novel The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, concentrating on mechanisms of reader perception. Starting with a survey of the main contemporary definitions of unreliable narration as well as sources of unreliability, the article moves to the problem of how unreliable narration can influence a reader of the analysed text, discussing ways in which unreliability combines with other aspects of the narrative. The effect of unreliable narration on the reader is examined in terms of recipient immersion. The disclosure of unreliable statments, the search for truth hidden beneath the cover of narration, along with the recuperation of the “reliability” of the narrator are viewed as supplementary objects of the reader’s interest during text perception. Attention is focused on two components of reader gratification as manifest in Hawkins’ novel: intellectual satisfaction due to the solution of the murder mystery (temporal immersion), as well as satisfaction resulting from the protagonist’s psychic recovery and revenge (emotional immersion). The last section of the paper compares the reader’s perception of the novel with the viewer’s reactions to a screen version directed by Tate Taylor.

Unreliable narration research raises the problem of truthful information presented in fiction, which is for the most part made up. However, the truth in the fictional world is what the reader believes to be true. Therefore, deliberate deluding or confusing the reader by an untrustworthy character creates an additional fictional layer consisting of false facts. This represents the contradiction between the imaginary and the fake, the latter being untrue in terms of fiction. The paper examines how the author of the best-selling novel Gone Girl realizes her intention of deceiving or misleading the readers on the syntactic level of speech of the two main characters who are unreliable narrators. The analysis of sentence structure variety, average sentence length and syntactic stylistic peculiarities of I-utterances aims at ascertaining whether these devices and their frequency indicate that the author gives the readers a hint at the unreliability of the narration. Sentence complexity and types of clauses in composite sentences are also taken into consideration as possible signs of unreliability. As one main character is male and the other is female, the quantitative analysis of syntactic features is carried out separately to detect gender differences.

By coining the term “unreliable narrator” Wayne Booth hypothesized another agent in his model besides the author, the implicit author, to explain the double coding of narratives where a distorted view of reality and the exposure of this distortion are presented simultaneously. The article deals with the applicability of the concept in visual narratives. Since unreliability is traditionally considered to be intertwined with first person narratives, it works through subjective mediators. According to scholarly literature on the subject, the narrator has to be strongly characterized, or in other words, anthropomorphized. In the case of film, the main problem is that the narrator is either missing or the narration cannot be attributed entirely to them. There is a medial rupture where the apparatus mediates the story instead of a character’s oral or written discourse. The present paper focuses on some important but overlooked questions about the nature of cinematic storytelling through a re-examination of |the lying flashback in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright. Can a character-narrator control the images the viewer sees? How can the filmic image still be unreliable without having an anthropomorphic narrator? How useful is the term focalization when we are dealing with embedded character-narratives in film?