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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.

The subject of the article: The article raises several urgent problems of narratology - the question of the «unreliable» narrator in the text, his point of view on the events underlying the history. This paper examines the internal and external point of view in a work with an «unreliable» narrator. A work with an «unreliable» narrator organizes a special point of view on the event hypothesis is put forward. The material is the narrator of V. Nabokov`s story «The Eye». In this text, the narrator's point of view on events, himself in these events and the characters reveals a split into external and internal. The narrator's play with the point of view forms a special type of «unreliable» narrator, which allows the author not only to create an experimental narrative, but also to raise the philosophical problems of memory, self-identification, and consciousness.

The article is a creative portrait of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature Kazuo Ishiguro. The author reveals the peculiarities of the author’s prose, his writing style, which makes the work of K. Ishiguro unique against the background of the existing variety of contemporary prose in Great Britain. The Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2017 Literature Prize to Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born British writer, has been welcomed by critics and admirers of his work, especially given the publicly controversial awards of previous years. The reasons for this unanimity are obvious. Firstly, Ishiguro’s works are really popular and loved by various readers, both in the UK and far beyond its borders. Secondly, Ishiguro is a writer in the most direct, original sense of the word: he does not engage in politics, does not give interviews on sensitive issues of current international relations, but for several decades now, for several decades, he has published quite regularly, albeit at rather large intervals.

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.

This article reveals the definition of “narration”, which is closely related to such categories as “narrator” and “types of narration”. The characteristics that influence the types of narration are analyzed. Scientists pay attention to the narrator’s awareness, his/her presence in the novel, his/her attitude to other characters, and according to that identify the types of the narrator. The form and type of narration of the modern American novel “Gone Girl” by G. Flynn influences the creation and revealing of heros’ images. The narrators describe the same events from their own points of view. The first person narrative, as a rule, creates an atmosphere of confidential conversation; however, the opposite perception is formed through the type of narration chosen by the author from the first person of two unreliable narrators.

If “Man” is an unreliable narrator then “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” perhaps the most scrutinized story in American literature, is an apt choice for a close reading in and of the Anthropocene. “Bartleby” dramatizes the bad faith of humanism as the bad faith of capitalism, and invites speculation about oceans, islands, and becoming rock. Humanism’s discourse of worlds as islands has often been animated by a desire for mastery if not management, a levee for the fear of the nonhuman and inhuman. Our Lawyer’s strange Manhattan story, his island narrative of a visitant copyist, is a haunting of Wall Street by Wall Street. Taking “Bartleby” as an urtext of American global thought, this chapter will close read close readings of “Bartleby” - what has come to be called the “Bartleby Industry” - and offer its own entangled reading of the story, using metaphor to assert the importance of materiality. Without falling into a facile reading of a text as a prescription for philosophical or ecological ills, literature is still, as Kafka had it, “the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” The inhospitality of “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” is a dramatization of the corporeality of the geologic and the geology of embodiment that makes a larger place for the inhuman inside us. If we can “stay,” as Kathryn Yusoff has it, or tarry with the idea of Anthropocene, close reading itself becomes both a means and an end. It is an insistence on knowledge’s, on science and literature’s, entanglement with ethics and a reminder of the politics of measurement.

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.

Novels by the Nobel Prize winner in literature 2017 K. Ishiguro are analyzed chronologically, from the first novel A Pale View of Hills (1982) to the latest one The Buried Giant (2015). As the article shows, the author, who represents two cultural traditions, the Japanese and the British ones, reflects this quality in his works. The writer himself states that his works were mainly formed by the European literary tradition and, consequently, his novel The Remains of the Day has become a concentrated study of Englishness, one of the most vivid in contemporary British literature. Experimenting with traditional literary forms, Ishiguro uses the stream-of-conscience technique, elements of science fiction, fantasy, detective genres, but each of his novels is unique and is characterized by deep overtones. Some constant elements of the writer’s works are discussed: unreliable narrators, the opposition of memory and history, the special role of children and of old people in his novels, the significant role of periods before and after historic events that are omitted in his novels, and recognizable language and style – compact, reserved and precise.

This essay maintains that an incarnational aesthetic often privileges the concrete over the abstract, transcends the dichotomy between the secular and the sacred, and offers a glimpse into the intersection of time and eternity, as evidenced in the works of Kathleen Norris, Madeleine L’Engle, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham, though such themes are given particular resonance in the non-linear narrative technique of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. Greene seeks to represent the simultaneity of past, present, and future in the cyclical technique of his novel, which offers the unreliable narrator a redemptive entrance into God’s wheeling story of eternal love. The revelation of Christ’s Incarnation and a revaluation of corporeal presence stand at the heart of this novel, underscoring how human intimacy is a window into divine intimacy.

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.

In arguing for a rereading of the unreliable narrator in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life as suffering from perpetrator trauma, this paper first...

One of the most troubling aspects of the Gospel of John is its tendency to create rigid dualisms between insiders and outsiders. This article uses the technique of deconstruction to undermine John’s characterization of the ultimate outsider: Judas. John inadvertently gives the reader the freedom to identify the anonymous figure of the other disciple who lets Peter into the high priest’s courtyard as Judas. Such identification leads to a deconstructive reading of the Gospel of John in which dualism collapses. With its ambiguities and aporias, the Gospel of John allows for the redemption of Judas when read deconstructively. The instability John’s dualism calls into question the validity of any strict binary that labels people as insiders or outsiders.

Among the large body of contemporary British novels dealing with the past, one specific genre can be identified, and called, the “novel of recollections” as it revolves around its first person narrator’s coming to terms with the often traumatic memories of his or her past life. This article focuses on this genre and its characteristic features, both formal and concerning the content, in John Banville’s The Sea (2005), Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011). Using the example of Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007), this article also shows that these features alone may not necessarily guarantee the text’s positive reception, suggests the main reasons why Swift’s novel failed with most readers and critics, and contemplates the novel of recollections’ future course and development.

Must a narrative be realistic or true to life? Is it the authors responsibility to construct a believable narrative, complete with a realistic structure? These are among the many questions explored by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. The work is considered to be something of a landmark text in respect to narrative theory. To date, the text is best remembered for how it marks the first appearance of the now-familiar term "unreliable narrator" (211). In the decades since the work was first published, Booth's term has been vigorously applied to a wide range of texts spanning centuries, genres, and mediums. Scholars who use the term generally do so in order to defend or refute a theory regarding a narrator's trustworthiness or validity as a storyteller. Although the narrators in question vary as widely as the texts that they live in, it is important to note that few groups are seen as unreliable in their narration of a story's events as are child and teenage narrators. Teenage and child narrators who have borne the brunt of this stigma include such iconic figures as Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and myriad others centered in a field of debate and inquiry. Yet this article is not about Holden or Huck. Neither is it intended to weigh the merits of Booths rhetoric nor those whose writings were influenced by his. Rather, the essay is centered on the short fiction of Ernest J. Gaines; I explore the response to the author's use of first-person child narrators in "A Long Day in November" and "My Uncle and the Fat Lady." The purpose? To consider them in the context of "unreliable narrators" and explore how and why select Gaines scholars and characters in the pieces identify his narrators as such. More precisely, I focus on the possibility that such claims, whether accidental or deliberate, illustrate a cultural bias rooted in an ageist ideology. Subsequently, I enter into brief discussions of a youth lens as a remedy and why Gaines's fiction is of significant use in this debate. Prior to doing so, it is worthwhile to open with a history of narrative unreliability. Booth situates the unreliable narrator and unreliability in general as a consequence of either deliberate irony--in some cases referring to it as "deception"--or as a matter of "inconscience" on a narrator's part. He attributes the latter term to Henry James, describing how it refers to a "narrator [who] is mistaken, or [who] believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him" (159). Booth further insists that the author is the person who determines how a narrator is perceived by an audience. He goes on to stipulate that readers are often in "collusion" with the author, complicit and eager in their shared judgment of a narrator. Together, author and readers critique a narrator by "agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting," especially "when the narrator shows ignorance of matters of fact" (304). The eagerness readers experience arises from the agreed-upon judgment, in turn eliciting a "pride in [their] own knowledge" and the opportunity to simultaneously exclude and "ridicule" the subject in question (304). Author and audience thereby exert a prejudice and superiority over fictional narrators of various backgrounds and narrative techniques. For first-person narrators, especially those of a younger age, this pattern is doubly damning as it already has a cultural system of ageism and a corresponding language to rely upon. Few scholars make this as apparent as does William Riggan, author of Picaros, Madmen, Na'ifs, and Clowns. Unlike Booth, the scholar discusses specific categories of first-person narrators-referenced in the work's title--and why they are particularly suspect. Initially, he indicates that, barring "any obvious errors of fact," the first person features an intrinsic realism which complies with readers' "natural tendency" to believe in a narrator and what the narrator conveys to an audience (19). Riggan attributes this to a "personalization" of such narrators and the intimate nature of a contract that readers enter into, subsequently prompting readers' belief in narrators' credibility. …

This study questions how the narrative voice of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers shapes the reader's understanding of the narrator’s motives concerning Juliana’s letters received from Jeffrey Aspern. This is qualitative analytical research in which ‘unreliable narrator’ theory was used to analyze and discuss the data from primary and secondary resources. This paper also links Booth’s idea to Schneider’s critics about unreliable narrator theory. Although The Aspern Papers’ narrator is unreliable due to his unpredictable and unstable actions, the researcher argues that The Aspern Papers’ narrator who also becomes the main character of the story wants to possess Juliana’s letters for his benefits. Should he get the letters, he would be able to “sell” Aspern’s life to the public, and thus he could get financial profit or personal profit for his career as a journalist, a writer, or a publisher.

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.

My essay sheds new light on the perceived shortcomings of Thackeray's narrator in Vanity Fair. There exists, I maintain, a level of narratological sophistication for which Thackeray is not adequately praised, and his dramatised narrator – a character long misunderstood and often maligned – is the key to our renewed understanding. In addition to thoroughly canvassing the ‘puppet’ narrator's dramatic evolution, I examine the ways in which previous scholars have both rejected and misrepresented ‘Before the Curtain’, Thackeray's introduction to the complete novel – what I call the novel's ‘surprise beginning’.

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.

In her memoir, Lying (2000), Lauren Slater fabricates most of her life narrative. Her text frustrates those who resent the combined fact and fiction—or “faction”—that she spins. This readerly response is understandable. Nevertheless, this article maintains that Slater lies in her memoir not to mislead readers but to witness traumas she struggles to access and articulate. Trauma and autobiographical theorists document the necessity of writing through—or “witnessing”—trauma to overcome it. When, however, a narrator is inhibited by what psychiatrists call “psychic constriction” (memory loss due to an inability to reconcile oneself with a painful past), she can become powerless to take the steps necessary to recover, as she cannot convey fully what she has suffered. Such is the case for Slater, who lies to witness ineffable traumas alongside her very inability to witness them. Lying also opens an important question about the reader’s role in traumatic witnessing: how does one respond to the traumatic testimony of an unreliable narrator? In answer, inasmuch as one may resist Slater’s memoir, one also has the ability to enter into and engage in her experience. In presenting this opportunity, Lying offers the writer-narrator and reader-respondent alike, a way to witness trauma together.

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 article examines the range of responses to oddness – everything that is offbeat, lopsided, or decategorized in human experience – dramatized by the fiction of Julian Barnes. Barnes is a connoisseur of eccentricity: the figure of the oddball – the crank, hobbyist, or obsessive – frequently takes centre stage in his fiction, often in the guise of a distinctly unreliable narrator. And odd numbers, especially triptychs of inter-related stories and triangular romantic relations, seem to dominate his narrative structures. Yet, his fiction also displays misgivings about its own connoisseurial delight in oddness. These misgivings are particularly legible in his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, a text in which the Barnesian language of oddness is both deployed and subtly undermined.

One of the key components of Javier Cercas’s novel Soldados de Salamina (2001) is its unreliable narrator, whose name is also Javier Cercas. This article proposes that we need to take a closer look at the psychology of this character as it is delineated in the text, not only because he turns out to be a more complex individual than is usually recognized, but also because his particular psychology has a significant bearing on the nature of his narratorial unreliability and how it manifests itself. Several categories of personality traits are identified: self-deprecating; libidinous/indiscreet; opinionated; superior; punctilious; over-precise; and error-prone, and then each is illustrated and analyzed in turn. Having established this psychological profile, of an idiosyncratic, quirky, and inconsistent individual with several internally contradictory features, we can contrast it with the various pronouncements made by the real Cercas about his fictional self, determine how these traits interact with the notion of the “relato real” favored by the narrator, and appreciate how, ultimately, this profile contributes substantially to the sense of contingency and undecidability that permeate the novel.

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. …

Wayne C. Booth says that a novelist creates an implied author that is an ideal, literary, and created version of the real author. Seymour Chatman has emphasized the implied author is a principle that invents the narrator who has the direct means of communicating. Chatman says it is important distinguish among narrator, implied author, and real author. Booth originally says that unreliable narrators vary on how far and in what direction they depart from the author’s norms. The concept of Booth’s term ‘unreliable narrator’ has been a subject to debate. In Ansgar Nunning’s perspective, the reader has a role in detecting narrational unreliability. There are four forms of unreliable narration: intranarrational unreliability, internarrational unreliability, intertextual unreliability, and extratextual unreliability. Julian Barnes’ novel The Noise of Time is a fictional biography of a real Russian composer named Dmitri Shostakovich whose work of art flourishes even under the oppression of the Soviet government. According to a review in The Guardian, the novel is mainly on Shostakovich’s battle with his conscience when living under the rule of Joseph Stalin. It is possible that the real author, implied author, and narrator are the same person in Barnes’ case. The objective of this article is to examine whether Barnes is reliable in telling the story of Shostakovich or not.

Deemed “Father of the Japanese Short Story”, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's work has been epoch making in its themes and stylistic quality. Nothing defines Japanese modern literature like his enigmatic mystery fiction, Yabu No Naka. This research paper explores the craftsmanship and complexity of the unreliable narrators that turn this short story in powerful commentary on human psyche and subjectivity while maintaining the suspenseful simplicity of the riddle presented to readers. Through the presentation of testimonies, the writer urges the reader to delve into the circumstances, temperaments and hidden interests of the characters, using the monologues to paint a socio – historical picture of human existence. An attempt is made to analyse the reasons for the unreliability of the narrations and the effect they have on the reader's perception of the mystery.

The article addresses the question of who reports the dialogue in fictional texts featuring an unreliable narrator. Since no human being can remember and reproduce lengthy conversations accurately, some narrative theorists attribute direct speech representation to the author instead of the character narrator. This means that the speech of other characters may be reported reliably even if the narrator is totally unreliable. The narrator’s version of the events may then be contradicted by others, which allows the reader to perceive his biases. However, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World illustrates the fact that direct speech reports, too, can be distorted by the narrator’s subjectivity, especially his emotions. In Ishiguro’s novel, the narrator’s grief and depression lead him to misremember and invent past conversations. Following Meir Sternberg, the article argues that the reliability of speech reporting in unreliable narration must be determined on a case-by-case basis. The text must signal that the narrator’s speech reporting is unreliable. In the absence of a signal, the reader is supposed to disregard any deviations from verbatim reproduction and to accept the transgression of the limits of human memory., International Journal of Literary Linguistics, Vol 5, No 2 (2016): Approaches to Fictional Dialogue

This piece builds upon two well-established approaches to Book 5 of Statius’ Thebaid: Hypsipyle as a sophisticated and potentially unreliable narrator of her own experiences and Nemea as a place of particularly Callimachean resonance. I argue that Statius provides hints of a possible interpretation of events in which Hypsipyle is deeply implicated in the violence on Lemnos and in which she repeats this proclivity to wantonly murder young men by deliberately abandoning Opheltes to a cruel fate she has carefully designed for him. This is more or less the charge the boy’s furious mother, Eurydice, subsequently hurls at Hypsipyle. That accusation fails to gain any traction in part because of the sympathy that Hypsipyle has carefully cultivated with the Argives, but mainly because it seems on the face of it utterly implausible. What motive could Hypsipyle possibly have had for murdering an infant to whom she was clearly attached by a close mutual bond of affection? But Hypsipyle knows that Nemea is fated to give the first victim of the Argive expedition, and she sees that she is in danger of recapitulating the fate of Callimachus’ Hecale, the elderly hostess whose life is forfeited at the outset of a heroic expedition. So she has to find a substitute.

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

In the light of what we learn about the character of the Marques de Bradomin, he appears to constitute a classic example of an unreliable narrator. At the same time, given that the Sonata de otono is presented as part of his memoirs, he as the putative author/narrator is in full control of what he chooses to include or exclude and how he depicts himself and his actions. I propose that the motivation behind the choices he makes is a good deal more complicated – and devious – than has hitherto been recognized. Close scrutiny of several key episodes reveals unresolved discrepancies and a self-portrayal that is often deliberately negative. Both phenomena contribute to the construction of his 'decadent' but at the same time elusive persona, and to a kind of narrative mise en abyme where the reader is left wondering just who is manipulating whom.A la luz de lo que aprendemos acerca del Marques de Bradomin, parece constituir un ejemplo clasico del narrador no fidedigno. Al mismo tiempo, dado que la Sonata de oto...

In the domain of narrative theory, Wayne C. Booth’s two most important books are The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep.1 The Rhetoric of Fiction remains required reading for narrative theorists because it gives us terms and concepts such as implied author and unreliable narrator that we still find productive (and worthy of debate), because it demonstrates the fallacious reasoning underlying abstract rules such as ‘showing is better than telling’ (such reasoning mistakes means for ends), and because it has paved the way for an understanding of any novel, and more broadly, any narrative as a rhetorical action: an author’s attempt to harness all the resources of storytelling for the purpose of evoking a set of effects (cognitive, emotional, ethical) in an audience. The Company We Keep remains required reading because it develops that rhetorical understanding of the novel as it investigates the nature and importance of the ethical effects of fiction. More specifically, Company explores the metaphor of books-as-friends by identifying the variety of invitations that authors extend to audiences (from subtle seductions to in-your-face challenges) and by calling attention to the patterns of desire that such invitations – and the narrative trajectories that follow from them– lead their audiences to experience. Both books