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The narrative structure of the novel “Savely’s Days” by G. Sluzhitel is considered. It is determined that a polyphonic system of narrative instances is expressed in the novel, and the relationship between them is established. Methods of creating a subjective versatility of the text have been studied. It is noted that the genre of memories as a whole retains constant features, which include the methods of creating a chronotope. It embodys the image of a hero, while it is the very feature of the protagonist, who is an unreliable narrator, that leads to the transformation of the classical narration of memories and to the emergence of several subject-speech plans. The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the narrative instances and the originality of their relationship in order to comprehend the narrative space of a work of art. The novelty is seen in the fact that the methods of creating the effect of polyphonic narration are determined on the basis of the material of the modern novel. The observation of the modern writer style formation is carried out. It has been proved that the polyphony of narrative images arises in the novel due to the fact that, technically, the story cannot be conducted only from the point of view of the cat-narrator, since this will significantly limit the discourse. The purpose of polyphony is to look at a modern person from different points of view, including a detached one.

Theocritus divides his second Idyll into two roughly equal sections, each punctuated by ten refrains: in the first half, a courtesan named Simaetha describes an ongoing erotic spell that she and her servant are performing and at the same time she enacts it by reciting a series of short similia-similibus incantations; in the second half, she speaks to Selene in the night sky and tells her the story of her brief affair with and betrayal by a handsome young athlete named Delphis. Literary scholars have written much about this poem, but they are more often concerned with the second, confessional half, with its complicated narrative layers and its charmingly naïve and unreliable narrator. Historians of religion and magic, on the other hand, have focussed most of their energies on the first half of the poem, using as comparanda the much later evidence of Roman-era curse tablets (katadesmoi) and late antique magical papyri to make sense of what Simaetha does and says during her long ritual, an approach that was enshrined by Gow in the middle of the last century, when he argued that, because of the conservative nature of these later magical spells, there was little risk of serious anachronism in using them for comparison.

Medieval German literature had a deeper impact on Thomas Mann than is typically assumed. The comparison between Wolfram’s von Eschenbach Parzival and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain illustrates this influence. Nearly 700 years separate both novels, nevertheless, they show amazing parallels. Especially as their narrators are very much alike. Both appear exposed in their stories, utilise Wolfram’s Bogengleichnis, and are unreliable. In addition, they both reflect on their narrations as literary constructs. While Wolfram’s narrator defends his protagonist Parzival for his misdeeds Mann does not bother to do so for Hans Castorp. The heroes and other characters are comparable, but develop differently. Parzival gains knowledge and his identity, whereas Hans Castorp loses both. Parzival fails his first encounter with the grail. Castorp, in contrast, wins a deep insight into life in his Schneetraum; but forgets it immediately. Castorp is as foolish as Parzival when he begins his journey. He is, however, not a grail-quester although Howard Nemerov concludes this in his 1939 dissertation. Yet, the Magic Mountain seems strongly influenced by Parzival. But while the characters in Parzival seek to help the central protagonist, egoism is predominant in the Magic Mountain, the hero stagnates and fails to successfully finish the hero’s journey.

Trying to find the roots of the current post-truth era, one possible path of origin presents itself when it comes to the literary tradition: the unreliable narrator. How does this phenomenon project itself in such a particular place between fact and fiction, occupied solely by literary autobiographies? Eudora Welty and Tom Robbins, two prominent 20th century literary personas, provide a detailed account of their journey towards self-realization in two connected, yet very different ways. Their memoir and autobiography provides a detailed map of this journey. We can hence speak of positive trauma when it comes to recollection of successful literary careers. Imagination, memory and choice all play an important part in this unique narratives’ creative process. Understanding the relationships between these elements provides even more understanding when it comes to unreliability and our own perception of reality. What are the specific details of memory the authors put down on paper in order to make sense of their creative lives? How do we spot their importance? What role does memory play in the creative process of these authors? How do they approach imagination? What is their relationship with their own narrators and protagonists, a.k.a. themselves? Can we trust it? Dare we trust it? And if so, how do we do it as readers? All these questions are to be addressed and discussed in the following article.

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.

This paper examines the narrative and stylistic strategies at work in Emma Healey's Elizabeth is Missing (2014) to render the condition implied by Alzheimer's disease. At the beginning of the novel, because she has forgotten what has recently happened to her friend Elizabeth and can just see in the present that “Elizabeth is missing”, Maud starts an inquiry, convinced that something amiss has happened to her friend. In Maud's mind, this investigation combines with that of her sister's unexplained disappearance shortly after the second world war. Maud is however stalled in her double project of investigation because of her developing dementia. This paper first considers the use of conceits belonging to detective fiction in Healey's novel before exploring the role and impact of the first-person narrator. Finally, it tries to establish if the detour by detective fiction and the reference to the historical past of post-war Britain provide the means for a stabilizing closure., Si la maladie a toujours été présente en littérature, de nouvelles affections ont récemment fait leur entrée dans la fiction anglophone fiction. Tel est le cas de la maladie d'Alzheimer et autres formes de démence qui perturbent le fonctionnement normal du cerveau dont notamment la mémoire des individus. Cet article se concentre sur Elizabeth is Missing (2014) d'Emma Healey (traduit en français par Corinne Daniellot sous le titre L'oubli). Au début du roman, parce qu'elle a oublié ce qui vient d'arriver à Elizabeth et qu'elle constate seulement l'absence de son amie (“Elizabeth is missing”), Maud entreprend une enquête. Dans l'esprit de Maud, cette investigation se combine à un autre, concernant la disparition inexpliquée de sa sœur juste après la seconde guerre mondiale. Maud est cependant contrariée dans sa double quête par l'avancée de sa mémoire déficiente. Nous examinerons en détail les stratégies narratives et stylistiques mises en œuvre, parmi lesquelles le recours au roman de détection et le choix d'un narrateur à la première personne, pour rendre compte du processus de l'oubli et de ses enjeux.

RESUMO: Este estudo visa à análise da utilização de um recurso literário no cinema: o narrador não confiável. A apropriação cinematográfica do narrador – elemento épico por excelência – engendrou algumas mudanças significativas desse recurso, haja vista as diferenças entre a sétima arte e a literatura, e as necessidades de adequação aos gêneros. No entanto, essa apropriação também manteve traços essenciais das diversas espécies de narrador tão estudadas na ficção escrita. Isto posto, propõe-se uma investigação do narrador não confiável no filme Anticristo, de Lars von Trier, à luz de um narrador literário: Bento Santiago, do romance Dom Casmurro, de Machado de Assis. Não obstante a distância temporal, espacial e genérica (no sentido de gêneros literário e cinematográfico), a aproximação desses narradores elucida questões interessantes, como por exemplo a crítica proposta pelas obras e o modo com o qual ela se relaciona com os seus respectivos públicos. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: narrador não confiável, ponto de vista, foco narrativo. __________________________ ABSTRACT: This study aims to analyze the use of a literary mechanism in cinema: the unreliable narrator. The cinematic appropriation of the narrator – an epic element par excellence – produced significant changes of this narrative resource, as there are differences between literature and the seventh art, and there is a need of adjustment according to each genre. Nonetheless, this appropriation also has maintained essential aspects of the multiple sorts of narrators, which are studied in writing fiction. Therefore, it is proposed an investigation of the unreliable narrator of the movie Antichrist, by Lars von Trier, in the light of a literary narrator: Bento Santiago, from the novel Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis. Despite the temporal, spatial and generic (in the sense of different genres, the literary and the cinematographic) distance between the movie and the novel, the comparison of these two narrators clarifies interesting issues, such as the critique proposed by these works and the way in which it relates to their respective audiences. KEYWORDS: unreliable narrator, point of view, perspective.

I n 2016 while the world was commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare [1564–1616] we heard Hamlet’s voice coming from Ian McEwan’s brand new book “Nutshell”. This time Hamlet (his name is not mentioned throughout the novel) is where Claudius wanted to send him, namely in today’s England, however still in his mother’s womb waiting to be born in two weeks’ time: “So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in and what I’m in for” [1, p. 1]. The novel starts with these questions [ontological, whose? and epistemological, why?] of the foetus and till the end of the story we learn about the events from this unreliable narrator; we listen to what he hears and see what he supposes he sees. Baby Hamlet has got curious and analytical mind which makes him kick his beloved mother from inside to wake her up in order to listen to the radio in the late hours: “Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning” [1, p. 4] Although he is confined to a “meagre living room”, he counts himself “an innocent”, “unburdened by allegiances and obligations”, “a free spirit” and strives to perceive the conscious life bestowed upon him by “Being”: “… my idea was To be. … The beginning of conscious life was the end of illusion, the illusion of non-being, and the eruption of the real” [1, p. 2–3].

Comedic Techniques and the Finnish Tradition of Folklife Description in Pauli Kohelo’s Novels Ohessa tilinumeroni and Kassan kautta The history of Finnish literature includes a rich and vivid tradition of folklife description. A signi cant amount of this tradition is humorous by nature. Especially funny is the common character of a thinker whose thoughts are comically folksy and vernacular. In this article, I read two contemporary Finnish novels, Pauli Kohelo’s Ohessa tilinumeroni (“Attached Please Find my Bank Account Number”, 2008) and Kassan kautta (“Through the Checkout”, 2014) as continuators of the Finnish description of folklife. According to my analysis the protagonist and the narrator of these novels, Pauli Kohelo, is a similar kind of character than the protagonists in Maiju Lassila’s Liika Viisas (“Too Wise”, 1915) and Veikko Huovinen’s Havukka-ahon ajattelija (“The inker of Havukka-aho”, 1952; none of these novels are translated into English). In this article, I use the incongruence theory of humor in order to analyze the comedic techniques used in Kohelo’s novels as well as in previous Finnish descriptions of folklife. My hyphothesis is that Kohelo’s novels represent a postmodern variant of the old tradition. They share many important features with the previous works, especially when it comes to scale, hyperbole and degradation as comedic techniques. en again, especially the meta ctive play with the genre of autofiction and the unreliable narrator distinguish these novels from the older tradition.

EnglishAfter having defined the role of the maps within European expansionist plans and the different uses of this topos in (post)colonial literature, my paper will focus on two emblematic novels, which share the same basic assumption, namely the idea that history, both individual and collective, is closely related to the mapping of urban and national territory: La mia casa e dove sono written by Igiaba Scego, and Maps by Nuruddin Farah. I will demonstrate that 1) Scego´s novel leads to a conciliatory construction of identity based on the confidence in narratives as a mean to “give an account of oneself” and on un unwarranted equivalence between “I” and “We” 2) Nuruddin Farah´s Maps, on the contrary, conceives the relation between individual and collective or between being member of a family and being member of a nation in allegorical way and adopts the point of view of an unreliable narrator. This way, he provides a convincing criticism of narrative as a privilege reserved to the members of the wealthy metropolitan elite, and sketches out a new geography of interpersonal and international relations where the frontiers are wholly de-naturalized. italianoDopo aver precisato il ruolo delle mappe nel quadro dei progetti espansionistici dell’Europa e i diversi usi di questo topos nella letteratura (post)coloniale, il contributo si focalizza su due opere emblematiche, che condividono la stessa ipotesi di fondo, ovverosia l’idea che la storia individuale e collettiva siano strettamente correlate alla cartografia del territorio urbano e nazionale: La mia casa e dove sono di Igiaba Scego e Maps di Nuruddin Farah. Si dimostrera che, mentre il romanzo di Scego giunge a una proposta identitaria conciliatoria basata sulla fiducia nella narrazione come strumento “per rendere conto di se” e su una disinvolta equivalenza tra l’“io” e il “noi”; quello di Farah, concependo il rapporto tra l’individuale/familiare e il collettivo/nazionale secondo le modalita dell’allegoria e facendo del protagonista un narratore inaffidabile, approda a una convincente critica della narrazione come privilegio delle elite metropolitane, e delinea una nuova geografia di rapporti interpersonali e internazionali dove le frontiere risultano completamente denaturalizzate.

This chapter investigates, as a ‘transtextual biography’ the changing reading practices of Conrad’s fictional merchant seaman narrator Charles Marlow, who eventually became a land-based reader. His reading practices through time and space, from ‘Youth’, through Lord Jim and ‘Heart of Darkness’ to Chance, are located within, and against, the reading cultures of narrative time, and the extent to which this reading echoes and challenges Conrad’s own is explored. This chapter touches lightly on the concept of ‘distant reading’ to consider whether Marlow is not only an unreliable narrator but an ‘unreliable reader’. The chapter ends by considering the extent to which Conrad’s own maritime reading spaces, like those of Marlow, resonated into his shore life in his various homes.

Статья посвящена особенностям повествования в романной прозе современного британского писателя К. Исигуро. Предметом рассмотрения является фигура эксплицитного рассказчика, особенности его повествовательного дискурса, а также соотношение позиций эксплицитного нарратора и имплицитного автора., The article raises some debatable problems about narration in the works of contemporary British writer K. Ishiguro. Based on his novels, the author considers issues of narrative discourse, the unreliable narrator and the implicit narrator., Университетский научный журнал, Выпуск 40 2018, Pages 24-33

By focussing on a page from the last chapter of La coscienza di Zeno, the article outlines the development of a typical Svevian theme, that of autobiographical writing as a form of mystification. The aim is to present the selected passage as the point of arrival of Svevo's (modernist) reflection on the relationship between reality and fiction.

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?

This article questions the “narrator theory of narration” with particular reference to medieval narratives, often retellings of existing stories, and generally neglected by current theory. Part I analyzes the concept of the internal, potentially unreliable narrator, widely regarded as a narratological necessity. Part II examines the history of the term narrator . Part III studies the theories of narration implied by scribal annotations in some medieval manuscripts. Parts IV, V, and VI discuss three medieval cases—Malory’s Morte Darthur , Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and the anonymous Pearl —in which application of the narrator theory proves to be misleading.

L’article aborde la problématique du mensonge dans une perspective esthétique. La première partie analyse les différentes formes sous lesquelles la littérature, qui est en principe une forme de communication non-mensongère, peut représenter le mensonge et produire elle-même des mensonges spécifiquement littéraires ; la deuxième partie envisage le mensonge dans une perspective esthétique pour savoir dans quelle mesure une telle approche apporte des modifications à la théorie générale du mensonge. Der Aufsatz untersucht die Lüge aus ästhetischer Perspektive. Der erste Teil behandelt die Frage, in welcher Form Literatur, an sich eine lügenfreie Form der Kommunikation, literarische Lügen kreieren kann, während der zweite Teil die Lüge aus ästhetischer Perspektive untersucht und der Frage nachgeht, ob die allgemeine Theorie der Lüge aus dieser Perspektive zu modifizieren ist. The article investigates the structure and the forms of lying from an aesthetical point of view. The first part deals with the question as to what extent literature, which is principally a form of communication that does not lie, is able to represent lies and to create specific literary lies, whilst the second part endeavours to examine whether an aesthetical perspective entails a modification of the general theory of lying.

A partir de l’importance du statut de narrateur douteux (unreliable narrator) dans les textes de fiction et de sa discussion dans le cadre des modeles narratologiques, je m’attacherai a analyser la fonction qu’assume la narratrice dans le roman Johanna de Felicitas Hoppe. La these sous-jacente a ma contribution est que Felicitas Hoppe cree de toutes pieces une narratrice douteuse pour refleter son scepticisme litteraire a l’endroit de la narration non seulement au niveau thematique mais aussi formel.

Christian Kracht’s novel Faserland has often been considered as a pessimistic or ironic version of the Bildungsroman. This article shows that essential narrative strategies of the text do not fit into that genre, but can be seen as aspects of the picaresque novel with greater plausibility. The episodic narration of the journey through Germany and a decadent society is told by a highly unreliable narrator. He not only stages contradictory and ambivalent images of himself in the novel, but also serves as an additional mask for the author Christian Kracht who performs an autofictional play with mass media and public.

This interview with British writer Blake Morrison concentrates on his fiction and poetry. Themes that link his diverse body of work are traced, such as crime and self-revelation. Morrison’s fiction is placed within a realist context, aided by discussions of the importance of character, and the ‘state in the nation’ novel, contrasted with the idea of the unreliable narrator of postmodern fiction, which is also present. The interview discusses the writer’s influences—such as American fiction—and his interest in point of view.

This essay examinesthe floral telegraph;A New Mode of Communication by Floral Signals, a rare Victorian novel published anonymously in 1836 and reprinted in 1850 with a new tagline –The Floral Telegraph; Or, Affection's Signals. The reprint includes an ascription to Captain Frederick Marryat, Royal Navy (1792–1848) (See Figure 5). The majority of Marryat's biographers, scholars, and archivists have doubted the posthumous ascription. Here, I challenge the critical consensus and argue that Marryat did indeed writeThe Floral Telegraphpublished in 1836 and that the attribution of 1850 is correct. I begin with a biographical sketch of Marryat, a brief synopsis of the novel, and a review of its scant, mostly skeptical reception. I then argue that the “floral code” presented in the text resembles (albeit through parody) Marryat's famous codebook for maritime flag signals and that the Captain's acknowledged interest in botany and horticulture gave him the fluency necessary to create the Table of Flowers (See Figure 6). In addition, Marryat had a strong relationship with the novel's publisher, Saunders and Otley, and he was the editor of theMetropolitan, a literary magazine which ran a favorable review shortly afterThe Floral Telegraphwas first published. The narrative also reflects Marryat's stylistic tendency to satire and parody and his ideas about literacy and widespread publication seem to be inversely reflected in the ironic digressions of the unreliable narrator, Horace Honeycomb, and the diatribe against the “cursed and abominable art of Printing” (117) offered by the inventor of the floral code, Floribel. I conclude my essay by viewingThe Floral Telegraphas representative of early Victorian issues of literacy, affect, and disembodied, long-distance communication in the age immediately preceding the advent of the electromagnetic telegraph.

The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott. By Sarah Collins. Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng.: Boydell Press, 2013. [xxxi, 248 p. ISBN 9781843838074. $95.] Music ex- amples, illustrations, list of library sigla, bibliography, index.Proponents of Cyril Scott (1879-1970) have been delighted with the publication of new recordings and scores of his music during the past fifteen years. Much credit should be given to the composer's son, Desmond Scott, who has become a strong advocate for his father's music and has readily assisted performers and scholars alike by providing access to his father's archive. The complete solo piano works have been recorded by Leslie De'Ath in five volumes (Dutton CDLX 7150, 7155, 7166, 7183, 7224 [2005-2009], CDs). Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra have recorded many of Scott's orchestral works (including several pre- miere recordings) on four compact discs (Chandos CHAN 10211, 10376, 10407, 10452 [2004-2008]). Both of these labels have also recently released recordings of major chamber works (Dutton CDLX 7116 [2001], CD; Chandos CHAN 10575 [2010], CD). In 2001, Scott's Sonatina for guitar was rediscovered. Written for Andres Segovia, it has now been published and recorded. Scholarly work on Scott needs to catch up. Musicologists have called for a reevaluation of Scott's music for decades. A fairly steady stream of doctoral students have focused on Scott for their theses. One of these resulted in the book currently un- der review, Sarah Collins's The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott. The book has both strengths and weaknesses to consider.Collins's approach is certainly intriguing and relevant, but her task is difficult. She sets out to show the influence of symbolism on Scott during his youth and how it be- came both a central part of his guiding aes- thetic and "a pathway into a spiritual con- ception of his life and work." The latter refers to Scott's interest in theosophy.Collins did not set out to write a biogra- phy, but her book depends upon it to set the foundation of her study. Divided into two parts, the first section of the book, ti- tled "Public Indiscretions, Private Con- fessions: Scott's Life and Influences" is "largely psycho-biographical" (p. xxviii). The second part, "Artist, Priest, Prophet: Scott's Aesthetic Thinking" draws on the first part to examine Scott's aesthetic views. Throughout her study, Collins draws upon Scott's two autobiographies, My Years of Indiscretion (London: Mills & Boon, 1924) and Bone of Contention (New York: Arco, 1969); his books on music and other topics; his anonymous books; and letters from a variety of libraries and archives (British Library, Grainger Museum, Stefan George Archiv, University of London, and Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek).Scott's two autobiographies are impor- tant and cannot be dismissed in any serious study of him or his work. In fact, I will quote from them in this review. But the au- tobiographies must be approached with skepticism. As I have said elsewhere of My Years of Indiscretion, "one can leave the book having gleaned few details about his [Scott's] life, much less gaining insight into his personality" (Laurie J. Sampsel, Cyril Scott: A Bio-Bibliography [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000], 129). I have de- scribed Bone of Contention as "frustratingly inadequate ... as a source of facts and dates" (Sampsel, p. 143). In short, Scott is an unreliable narrator, and caution is in or- der. That is why Collins's use of letters to corroborate the events of Scott's life is so valuable. When she turns to the anony- mous writings by Scott (the Initiate series, Autobiography of a Child, etc.) even greater caution should be used. Collins mentions this, saying ". . . it would be extremely un- wise to trust the word of the 'unreliable narrator' " (p. 17). Yet at times, Collins does just that if it helps her prove a point. While Scott's anonymous books are surely autobiographical to some extent, that ex- tent has not been determined. …

Resumo: Estas obras de Machado de Assis e Henry James podem ser lidas como estórias sobre o narrador. A análise compara-os a partir desta consideração, estabelecendo como os dois autores, conhecidos como mestres do realismo psicológico, tentaram acrescentar alguma complexidade à sua obra discutindo temas já apresentados na literatura universal, ao enriquecer as normas da narrativa em 1a pessoa. Há também um propósito de estabelecer até que ponto a escolha do ponto de vista torna as obras particularmente interessantes e de efeito, pela análise da ação, personagens e estória.Abstract: These works of Machado de Assis and Henry James can be read as stories about the narrator. The analysis has compared them from this consideration, in order to establish how the two authors, known as masters of the psychological realism, have tried to add some complexity in their artcraft on discussing themes already presented in universal literature, by means of enriching the patterns of the narrative in the first person. There is also a purpose of pointing out to what extent the selection of point of view makes the works particularly interesting and effective, analyzing action, characters and story in support of that idea.

Based on the theory of unreliable narrator, this paper, by analyzing Nick's function as a narrator, tends to point out that Nick's vision is not identical to Fitzgerald's, for Nick is capable of being an unreliable narrator at moments that are crucial to the development of the story. Indeed, Nick is a flawed character, he is sometimes a confused, misleading, or inaccurate teller of his tale. As the spokesman of "Jazz Age", Frances Scott Fitzgerald has reflected in many of his works the social upheavals of the "roaring twenties" and the disillusionment of "American dream". His masterpiece The Great Gatsby which is highly praised by George Eliot as "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James" (qtd. in Donaldson 268) has raised many critics interests since its publication. It is the fact that many criticisms at home or abroad have touched upon this subject, but most of them are devoted to its theme, the corruption of American dream, the general style, the symbolism used in the novel and etc. Few critics have centered on its unique narrative techniques. Among all the criticisms about it, Robert Emmet Long's The Great Gatsby---the Intricate Art and Matthew J. Bruccoli's New Essays on The Great Gatsby are comparatively the most comprehensive, and yet they are respectively concerned with Fitzgerald's handling of time and space, and the theme of love, money and aspiration that reappears in this novel. The narrative technique is not systematically analyzed, not to mention the special function of Nick as a narrator. For years, traditional critics have taken it for granted that Nick, as the narrator, is speaking for his author. Furthermore, because something about Nick's "midwesternism" seems deeply personal to Fitzgerald, critics have tended not to distinguish between the narrator and his author. This paper, however, by analyzing Nick's function as a narrator, tends to point out that Nick's vision is not identical to Fitzgerald's, for Nick is capable of being an unreliable narrator at moments that are crucial to the development of the story. Indeed, Nick is a flawed character, he is sometimes a confused, misleading, or inaccurate teller of his tale.

In The Snake’s Pass (1890), Bram Stoker drew on two distinct literary aesthetics. One is unique to this novel, which is Stoker’s only work set in Ireland: the Irish narrative genre of stories about placenames, the dinnseanchas tradition. The second is a technique Stoker uses in almost all of his longer fiction, including Dracula (1897): the construction of an unreliable narrator, in this case Arthur Severn, the “I” through which all events are filtered. Previous readings that interrogate the character of this English narrator have assumed that all of Arthur’s perceptions of and commentaries on the environment, the people, and their motivations—indeed, all the “content” of the novel—are unproblematically delivered to us as readers. However, like each of the narrators in Dracula, Stoker gives his readers plenty of cues that Arthur is not an objective observer. Most of these cues occur within the narrative fissures provided by Stoker’s deployment of the dinnseanchas tradition, both within the content of the novel—that is, the narrative as Arthur relates it—and the larger structure of the tale as a whole (that is, as Stoker builds his novel). Though previous critics have simply collapsed the two English characters of Arthur and his friend Dick Sutherland, Stoker carefully distinguishes between the two. He also makes distinctions concerning the formation of a different community of inclusion in which membership is not determined by race or ethnicity, but rather by class and work ethic. These narrative subtleties problematize a general critical assessment that in The Snake’s Pass, “Stoker’s treatment of the Irish national character never strays far from the received categories of his

Las mascaras del heroe depicts Spanish society from the Second Republic to the start of the Civil War, a period when Spain was torn by poverty and immorality. This intertextual historical novel portrays figures such as Pedro Luis de Galvez, the last of the bohemians and a failed writer. We encounter Galvez through the first-person narration of Navales, who hates him deeply and presents him as a despicable, egotistical man. Navales himself proves to be an immoral person who tortures and kills for fun. Following the work of Wayne Booth and other critics, the article shows that Navales is an unreliable narrator and that Galvez is an antihero.

The form of the historical documentary today is familiar - painfully familiar: the narrator, the talking head-experts and witnesses, and the historical footage that illustrates the points the speakers are making. The narrator is required and often the star - From Ken Burns's Civil War on PBS, narrated by David McCullogh, to Eyes on the Prize, narrated by Julian Bond, to the new series on The History Channel, Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America, where Jeffrey Wright narrarates "Antietam," and Martin Sheen does "The Homestead Strike" - the narrator is the indispensable voice of meaning, and the explainer of the significance of the visual materials. The presence of the narrator in historical documentaries often reveals a lack of confidence in the visual. Meaning in all these documentaries is communicated through the words in the script. The visual material in a documentary may be glorious and powerful, but the reliance on the narrator reduces the finished work to the level of an illustrated lecture. But one historical documentary demonstrates that, in some cases at least, the omniscient narrator is unnecessary. Meaning can be conveyed solely through the editing and juxtaposition of film images. The meanings thus conveyed can be more powerful, more compelling, and more memorable than the verbal information in the script read by film narrators. That film is Atomic Cafe, a featurelength documentary released in 1982, produced, directed, and edited by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty and Pierce Rafferty.1 Obviously some historical documentaries require an omniscient narrator because the available visual documentation is inadequate, or because the analysis or interpretation is too complex to be presented through images. But in some cases, for some issues, reliance on the narrator is a weakness that can be avoided. Atomic Cafe presents a critique of official government policy regarding the threat of atomic war and nuclear radiation in the 1950s - the world of "duck and cover" drills in school and backyard fallout shelters. The filmmakers collected a wide variety of visual archival materials from that era - military training films, educational films, news broadcasts, public service spots, TV and radio comedies and dramas. Some of them were official government documents; many others were unofficial. Many of these films were shown to captive audiences in schools and military units; others were standard broadcast fare on radio and TV. So the film is a montage of found footage.2 It is also hilarious. Instead of an omniscient narrator, Atomic Cafe has dozens of narrators - all problematic: the narrators of the different news clips, educational films, and military training films. These voices speak with all the trappings of authority, but each represents a kind of "unreliable narrator."3 The point of the film is precisely to critique the statements of these narrators, to expose these narrators as purveyors of lies. This is the brilliant thing about Atomic Cafe: the only voices on the soundtrack, the only narrators in the film, are not telling the truth. The truth is found not in any spoken words, but rather exclusively in the filmmakers' juxtapositions of visual documents. Thus m Atomic Cafe there is no omniscient voice to tell viewers what to think. Some writers have argued that the absence of a narrator "lets the viewers come to their own conclusions."4 But this is wrong. This film has a message, presented clearly and forcefully; it is an expose about government propaganda. The message is that the government lied about the dangers of nuclear radiation and nuclear war. The message is: do not believe what the government says about nuclear war being winnable. The filmmakers convey meaning through the classic devices of cinema: editing and juxtaposition. You could call it roughly "Eisensteinian" - a rapid montage, juxtaposing images by film editing, that creates ideas not found in the original images, ideas that moreover have a strong emotional impact. …

“I remember thinking, this is going to be so exciting. My makeover. Here was my life about to start all over again” (Palahniuk, IM 286–287). These lines could be taken from a number of popular cultural sources: a cosmetic advertisement, a women’s magazine, a teen movie, or a reality television show. Yet, these are the words of Shannon McFarland, the fictitious and unreliable narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters. And she utters them when recounting the thoughts she had before she shot herself in the face.

This chapter investigates further re-Orientalising strategies beyond the unreliable narrator, devised to circumvent some of the problematic issues of representation. In a reverse Orientalism, Mohsin Hamid, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, represents East-West relationships entirely through an Eastern/Oriental lens, suppressing the Western viewpoint and further polarising East and West. This is an aggressive re-Orientalism, deliberate, dichotomising, and confrontational. A contrasting method is demonstrated through Anuradha Roy’s The Folded Earth, via a protagonist who is hardly identifiable culturally as Indian. This protagonist is the Even-Newer-Indian-Woman. Roy’s representations evade easy exoticisation or categorisation, eluding the traditional categorising boundaries of gender and culture.

Nobody can work in material of which the properties are unfamiliar, and a reader who tries to get possession of a book with nothing but his appreciation of the life and the ideas and the story in it is like a man who builds a wall without knowing the capacities of wood and clay and stone. Many different substances, as distinct to the practiced eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a novel, and it is necessary to see them for what they are. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921) What makes the narration of Tristram Shandy so striking is that we are never allowed to forget that everything we learn reaches us mediated by the idiosyncratic voice of Tristram himself. You could put it more strongly than this and say that the telling of events constitutes the main event, as would later become the case in many twentieth-century novels: “There is the story of one's hero,” Henry James wrote of his novel The Ambassadors (1903), “and then … the story of one's story itself.” That novels are never simply unfolding before our eyes but are narrated from somewhere is one of the most important factors to keep in mind as we read them. Although other predominantly narrative forms such as theater and film have strategies of their own to direct our perceptions and make particular meanings possible, they usually present events as if they are happening before our eyes rather than being “told” to us: unlike the events of a novel, dramatic and cinematic events are enacted rather than narrated.

El presente artículo trata de demostrar la simbiosis existente entre la novela Lolita y el arte cinematográfico. No sólo por las dos adaptaciones de las que ha sido objeto la novela de Vladimir Nabokov, sino también por las propias características estilísticas y narrativas de la novela, plagada de referencias y recursos puramente cinematográficos. Recurso clave durante toda la novela, la técnicacinematográfica se convierte en el mejor aliado del narrador no fiable –Humbert Humbert– en su lucha por dominar a Lolita y manipular al lector. Para finalizar, se intenta demostrar una afinidad perpetua entre el personaje tipo de Lolita y el cine, especialmente el deHollywood.

Said the great conductor Herbert Von Karajan about his arch-rival Leonard Bernstein (and it was a compliment he paid to few fellow musicians): ‘He’s full of music.’ The same kind of compliment could be paid to Greene: he’s full of literature. When reading a book of his, one feels as if one is reading several books, so packed are they with allusions, parallels and evocations: they breathe the air of a cultured man steeped in the literature of his and earlier times. It is one of the reasons for the deceptive richness of his novels, the revelation of a depth that goes beyond fascinations of plot and character in the thriller mode. Entertaining and individualistic, Greene also carries with him the resonance of an older and distinguished literary tradition. He not only absorbed what he observed for future use in his novels but also absorbed what he read. As important to his literary biography as the life in his books were the books in his life.

In his memoirs Sir Peter Medawar, describing a meeting with C.S. Lewis, characterizes him (hardly surprisingly, as he studied hard for the part), as ‘English in an intolerant, Johnsonian way’.1 Northanger Abbey, too, one feels, sets about being ‘English in the intolerant, Johnsonian way’, but its very success as a novel depends on its failure to sustain this, like the good, self-deconstructing artefact it turns out to be. It seems to be caught, in the end, with its irony pointing the wrong way, rather like the British guns at Singapore. Nevertheless, as both Claudia Johnson and Raymond Williams would confirm,2 it fairly bristles with confidence as it sets out to diagnose and mildly defame what Johnson himself would have called Catherine’s ‘dangerous prevalence of imagination’.3 .3 Although the importance of this anti-romantic idea to Northanger Abbey can hardly be overemphasized, and remains as its essential scaffolding, what the text also discloses is that Catherine’s ‘dangerous prevalence of imagination’ is an indispensable clue to the ‘horrid mystery’4 of an England which is shown to be quite unlike rather than like the reassuring version promoted by the enlightened, patronizing Henry Tilney, as he prattles magisterially by Catherine’s side.

(1) That narrative unreliability is a concept separable from the concept of an unreliable narrator; (2) That narrative unreliability requires for its explanation the concept of an implied author; (3) That narrative unreliability bears close and interesting connections to the importantly distinct concept of an ambiguous narrative;1 (4) That we can explain the prevalence of certain devices in narrative in terms of the ease or difficulty of the reader's task in figuring out whether and how those devices are being used.

(1983). The Problem of the Unreliable Narrator in Jorge Amado's Tenda dos Milagres. Kentucky Romance Quarterly: Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 311-321.

The problems entailed by first-person narration and the novel of the ‘unreliable narrator’ are well known. A first-person narration will give the reader a fuller experience of a particular subjective view of the world, which is a desirable end, while at the same time it will make it impossible for the reader to see how this subjective point of view is meant to square with the world as experienced by others. What value are we supposed, or ought we, to give to any one point of view in the search for truth? The first-person narration poses an implicit question of evaluation: how important is this evidence? If the subjective point of view is also untrustworthy, that is, if we cannot take everything reported as being made up of true or sincere reports, then we have a problem of validity as well as one of evaluation. In Joyce Cary’s trilogy we find three first-person narrations which are apparently the tales of ‘unreliable narrators’. It is perhaps not surprising then that Robert Bloom concludes his study of Cary’s second trilogy with the belief that the reader’s attempt to extract a coherent vision from the three novels is hopeless, frustrating, impossible: But his inclusiveness is a liability as well as a strength, for it impedes his ordering of his own energies and the energies of his characters. He fails to provide us with a reliable means of concluding from the novels themselves something more than that the world is senselessly divided and sustained by a compelling, frequently disastrous, vitality.1

Fowles’s next published work, The Ebony Tower, appeared in 1974. Like The Collector, it was produced during the gestation of a longer work; Fowles interrupted his work on Daniel Martin and turned out the first drafts in a few days. The Ebony Tower is chiefly notable for two reasons. In the first place it constitutes Fowles’s first (and so far only) venture into the short story or novella: the collection contains four original pieces, varying in length from 110 pages down to 44. The second striking feature is the prominence given to a piece which is not in fact original at all, namely Eliduc, a translation by Fowles of a mediaeval French tale which was itself drawn (as the quotation above implies) from yet older Celtic sources. The tale, translated accurately and self-effacingly,1 is included in full, and is preceded by an introduction in which Fowles develops both a personal and a general theory of fiction. This theory traces the origins of the novel directly to the influence of the Celtic romance; in an arresting phrase, Fowles remarks that in reading stories such as Eliduc ‘[the] writer of fiction … is watching his own birth’ (p. 120).