The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction

Dawson, Paul

doi:10.1353/nar.0.0023

Cited by 18 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 26 publications

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“…This explains the persistence of debates over the issue of the limits to so-called narrative omniscience (Culler 2004;Nelles 2006;Dawson 2009 contrast, first-person fiction is marked. Indeed, it is the unacknowledged marked status of first-person fiction that explains the persistence of the critical debate over narrative unreliability.…”

Section: Narration Markedness Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining the reliable narrator: The marked status of first-person fiction

Murphy

2012

Journal of Literary Semantics

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In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth first proposed the critical concepts of the reliable and unreliable narrator. Booth suggested that the notion of reliability was best defined in terms of its underlying relationship to the implied author. But this attempted linkage was never a truly secure one; and in the intervening years, a protracted debate has persisted regarding this central issue. This paper suggests that the key to resolving this debate is the formulation of a more secure definition of narrative reliability. The linguistic concept of markedness provides the critical means for doing this. Using the test case of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, five determinants of a reliable narrator in first-person fiction are suggested: a secure speaking-location back home; the use of the classical middle style of standard English; observer-narrator status; ethical maturity; and a plot structure which involves the retrospective reevaluation or Aristotelian anagnorisis of a character other than the narrator. If this much is accepted, unreliable narration may be defined in terms of a range of departures from this basic model.

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Section: Narration Markedness Ordermentioning

confidence: 99%