Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy NarratorsAuthor(s): Greta OlsonSource: Narrative, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 93-109Published by: Ohio State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20107302 .Accessed: 07/05/2011 02:34

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Greta Olson

Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators

INTRODUCTION

Why do we fail to trust some narrators, and why do the tales other narrators tell

strike us as incomplete? How do the phenomena of untrustworthy and fallible narra

tion function within fictional texts, and how do readers respond to these kinds of nar

ration? In this essay I will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booth's

introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narra

tion as a function of irony, since this formulation remains the leading model for un

reliable narration. I will then describe how Booth's text-immanent model of narrator

unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Niinning for disregarding the reader's role

in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of

the implied author. Niinning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreli

ability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists be

tween the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the

text. Niinning, I argue, overstates his case and ignores the structural similarities be

tween his and Booth's models. Both models have a tripartite structure that consists of

(1) a reader who recognizes a dichotomy between (2) the personalized narrator's per

ceptions and expressions and (3) those of the implied author (or the textual signals).

Finally, I offer an update of Booth's model by making his implicit differentiation be

tween fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit. Drawing on new research on un

reliability, I suggest that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in

readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and trustworthiness.1

Greta Olson is Visiting Professor for Literature in the North America Studies Program at the Univer

sity of Bonn. She has published work on Martin Heidegger's ethics, eating disorders in literature, and key holes as liminal spaces in eighteenth-century novels, and is now working on a book on representations of

criminals' bodies in English literature from Shakespeare to Conrad.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2003)

Copyright 2003 by The Ohio State University

94 Greta Olson

BOOTH'S MODEL

Booth first gave readers a handle on how to think about narrators like Dosto

evski's Underground Man. Insisting that he suffers from liver disease while admit

ting that he cannot locate or identify his pain, the Underground Man contradicts

himself so much that the reader cannot take his words at face value: "I am a sick

man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am a most unpleasant man. I think my liver is dis

eased. Then again, I don't know a thing about my illness; I'm not even sure what

hurts" (3). Booth defines as unreliable those narrators who articulate values and percep

tions that differ from those of the implied author. The latter term was developed by Booth to circumvent problems of naively biographical readings of texts in which, for

instance, J. Alfred Prufrock's lack of agency was attributed to the same qualities in

the writer who gave him form, T. S. Eliot.2 As Booth comments, we cannot call

Voltaire when we want to question him about the right interpretation of Candide

(Irony 11). Booth understands narrator unreliability to be a function of irony. Irony pro

vides the formal means by which distance is created between the views, actions, and

voice of the unreliable narrator and those of the implied author. As the following pas

sage shows, Booth's descriptions of irony may be read as further explications of the

concept of unreliable narration:

All of the great uses of unreliable narration depend for their success on far more

subtle effects than merely flattering the reader or making him work. Whenever

an author conveys to his reader an unspoken point, he creates a sense of collu

sion against all those, whether in the story or out of it, who do not get that point.

Irony is always thus in part a device for excluding as well as for including, and

those who are included, those who happen to have the necessary information to

grasp the irony, cannot but derive at least a part of their pleasure from a sense

that others are excluded. In the irony with which we are concerned, the speaker is himself the butt of the ironic point. The author and reader are secretly in col

lusion, behind the speaker's back, agreeing upon the standard by which he is

found wanting. (Fiction 304)

Booth applies a communicative model to reading fiction here. This model allows for

secret communion between the "postulated reader" and the implied author (177). By

emphasizing the "unspoken," Booth anticipates work on conversational implicature

(by, for instance, Grice) and irony (Sperber and Wilson)?that is why we understand

"Is that your coat on the floor?" to mean "I want you to pick it up now" or perceive

"Lovely weather today" as a relevant comment on torrential rain. Detecting irony and narrator unreliability comprises an interpretive strategy that involves reading

against the grain of the text and assuming one understands the unspoken message be

yond the literal one. Booth's emphasis on the pleasures of exclusion suggests that the

reader and implied author belong to an in-group that shares values, judgments, and

meanings from which the unreliable narrator is ousted. Those who grasp irony and

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 95

detect unreliability share the insider joke and enjoy having survived the initiation rit ual the text appears to require.3

On the one hand, the complicity Booth describes between the implied author

and the postulated reader suggests that the implied author sends a message ("author

conveys") through the fictional medium, which the reader then receives.4 On the other hand, Booth displays awareness that the recognition of the narrator's inconsis tencies does not actually occur as between two persons on an intratextual level. The

implied author does not point her finger at the unreliable narrator or wink at the reader. Rather, this illustrative analogy is used to stress the reading sophistication that detecting unreliability requires.

Booth's detailed description of how irony functions in fiction bespeaks much more a reception-oriented model of text interpretation. In A Rhetoric of Irony Booth describes four steps for how a savvy reader recognizes irony in fiction and, in many cases, determines unreliability: the reader first rejects a literal semantic understand

ing of the text and recognizes "some incongruity among the words or between the words and something else that he knows" (10). For instance, a careful reader may wonder at the face value of Victor Frankenstein's professions of love for Elizabeth and respect for his mother's deathbed wish that he marry his "cousin" as soon as pos sible, when he departs soon after her death to take up his fatal studies in Ingolstadt.

Next the reader tries out alternative interpretations. For example, the reader decides that it is necessary to look critically at Moll Flanders's statements about how the threat of poverty repeatedly led her to steal after her return from America. Careful

reading reveals that Moll actually has enough money to maintain herself without

working in London for a number of years (Goetsch 281-86). The reader then makes a decision about the implied author's probable intentions, asking: "how were these

words meant to convey a message other than their intrinsic meaning?" Finally, a non

literal meaning is settled upon, one that most sophisticated readers?"those who have the necessary information"?would agree upon and unsophisticated readers would not.

One reads literally until textual markers and indications force one to revise one's interpretation. Weighing the totality of textual information, one concludes that the narrator's words are incongruous or incomplete. These textual signals include (1)

paratextual elements, as in titles such as Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, Confidence Man and in epigraphs; (2) direct warnings that the narrator should not be confused with the author, as in Nabokov's postscript to Lolita in which he distances himself from the sexual preferences of Humbert Humbert5; (3) obvious grammatical, stylis tic, or historical mistakes on the part of the narrator; (4) conflicts between fictional

facts; (5) and discrepancies between the values asserted in the work and those of the author in other contexts (Irony 47-86).

Given that textual signals of irony are marked, an objective standpoint exists from which insightful readers will judge irony and reliability. Hence unreliable nar ration is a textual constant. Furthermore, Booth contends that unreliable narrators are

consistently unreliable: once they have revealed themselves to be unreliable, they do not suddenly become infallible or conform to values otherwise asserted in the work.6 Booth provides a starting point for creating a typology of unreliable narrators. No

96 Greta Olson

tably, he uses the words "unreliable," "untrustworthy," "inconscience" (uncon

scious), and "fallible" to describe the narrators he wants to characterize:

I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with

the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author's norms), unreliable

when he does not.

If [the narrator] is discovered to be untrustworthy, then the total effect of the

work he relays to us is transformed.

It is most often a matter of what James calls inconscience', the narrator is mis

taken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him.

Sometimes it is almost impossible to infer whether or to what degree a narrator

is fallible. (Fiction 158-60)7

The above definitions demonstrate that Booth envisages different types of unreliabil

ity. "Unreliable" and "untrustworthy" suggest that the narrator deviates from the

general normative standards implicit in the text. For this reason the narrator cannot

be trusted on a personal level. By contrast, "inconscience" and "fallible" imply that

the narrator makes mistakes about how she perceives herself or her fictional world.

The first terms concern the narrator's qualities as a person and the second her ability to perceive and report accurately. Booth's mention of degrees of potential fallibility shows that he conceives of reliability and unreliability as well as fallibility and infal

libility as being interrelated rather than diametrically opposed.8

N?NNING'S MODEL

Ansgar N?nning's recently published monograph, Unreliable Narration, takes

issue with Booth's definition of unreliability.9 Niinning argues that the formulaic

adoption of the definition of the unreliable narrator in glossaries and dictionaries of

literary terms such as M. H. Abrams's has led to imprecise usage, a tendency to treat

reliability and unreliability as binary opposites, and a lack of attention to how unre

liability functions.

According to Niinning, the unexamined adoption of Booth's model of unrelia

bility has resulted in narrator reliability being regarded as a text-immanent issue that

rests solely on the distance between the implied author and the narrator (both intra

textual entities). For instance, Seymour Chatman's explication of Booth's model of

unreliability postulates two levels of communication, one between the implied au

thor and the implied reader and the other between the narrator and the narratee. Yet, in N?nning's eyes, Chatman fails to say how this communication works or how the

implied reader knows to interpret the narrator as being unreliable (Unreliable 14).

Furthermore, the coupling of unreliable narration with the "notoriously indefinite or

even indefinable implied author" causes obfuscation (16). In N?nning's view the

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 97

vague, pseudo-anthropomorphic concept of the implied author serves as a repository for all the open questions about the relationship between the author and the reader

but fails to answer any of them.10

N?nning contends that critics use the concept of the implied author to project their own values onto texts: first, they treat the narrator as a real person, whose lack

of reliability they perceive as a personal, moral failure or, at least, a limitation. This

leads critics to overemphasize mad monologists like the Underground Man, due to

these figures' easily identifiable moral failings. Second, critics understand them

selves to be in a personal relation to a hypothetical "man behind the curtain," a Wiz

ard-of-Oz incarnation of the author, who shares their general values as well as their

judgments of the narrator. N?nning points out that when critics like William Riggan state that narrators' lack of reliability can be recognized on the basis of "the unac

ceptability of th[eir] moral philosophy in terms of normal moral standards or basic

common sense and human decency" (Riggan 36; qtd. in Unreliable 21), they assume

the normative validity and universality of their "moral philosophy." Yet notions such

as "human decency" are highly culturally dependent. Hence, N?nning contests, crit

ics abuse the notion of the implied author to justify their subjective value judgments about the narrator's character.

N?nning finds evidence for his argument that attributing unreliability is solely a

function of reader reception in Vera N?nning's study of Oliver Goldsmith's The

Vicar of Wakefield. In her study?one chapter of the monograph on unreliability? Vera N?nning posits that the reception of unreliability is historically variable: The

Vicar of Wakefield's narrator Primrose was interpreted as sympathetic and trustwor

thy by two centuries of readers, only to have his reliability questioned during recent

decades. Historically varied responses to Primrose's reliability serve as proof for

Ansgar N?nning's argument that narrator unreliability is not a stable objective qual

ity but a function of reader reception. Readers disagree about which narrators are un

reliable. For instance, according to N?nning, a male pederast will not find Nabokov's

Humbert Humbert unreliable because his values are not in discord with the narrator's

(Unreliable 25). Hence ascribing unreliability is a strategy for reading texts rather

than a text-immanent phenomenon. The divergence between the reader's worldview

and that of the narrator?rather than inconsistencies between the narrator and the im

plied author?causes the reader to classify the narrator as unreliable.

Now comes the paradoxical moment in N?nning's argument. While reasoning that attributing unreliability results from text reception and is not a text-immanent

phenomenon, N?nning nonetheless wishes to clear up the confusion surrounding un

reliable narrators by enumerating specific textual markers that signal them. N?n

ning's list of textual signals is intended to demonstrate that the narrator appears unreliable to real historically- and culturally-embedded readers (versus Booth's pos tulated one). This is, however, problematic. For if detecting unreliability functions as

a quality of individual reader response, how can stable textual signals exist to typify the phenomenon of unreliability?

N?nning's list of textual signals includes: (1) the narrator's explicit contradic

tions and other discrepancies in the narrative discourse; (2) discrepancies between

the narrator's statements and actions; (3) divergences between the narrator's descrip

98 Greta Olson

tion of herself and other characters' descriptions of her; (4) contradictions between

the narrator's explicit comments on other characters and her implicit characterization

of herself or the narrator's involuntary exposure of herself; (5) contradictions be tween the narrator's account of events and her explanations and interpretations of the

same, as well as contradictions between the story and discourse; (6) other characters'

corrective verbal remarks or body signals; (7) multiperspectival arrangements of

events and contrasts between various versions of the same events; (8) an accumula

tion of remarks relating to the self as well as linguistic signals denoting expressive ness and subjectivity; (9) an accumulation of direct addresses to the reader and

conscious attempts to direct the reader's sympathy; (10) syntactic signals denoting the narrator's high level of emotional involvement, including exclamations, ellipses,

repetitions, etc.; (11) explicit, self-referential, metanarrative discussions of the narra

tor's believability; (12) an admitted lack of reliability, memory gaps, and comments

on cognitive limitations; (13) a confessed or situation-related prejudice; (14) para textual signals such as titles, subtitles, and prefaces (adapted from Unreliable

27-28).u

N?nning summarizes cognitive theories of reading to describe how individuals

ascribe unreliability to narrators. To begin with, the reader notes textually evident

discrepancies between the narrator's actions or telling of events and other versions of

the narration or of the narrator. The reader then relates these discrepancies to other

frames of experience. According to theories of "naturalization" (Culler; Fludernik, Fictions and 'Natural'Narratology), readers relate what they read to ordinary human

actions, motivations, and behavioral scripts. They impose their expectations about

how texts should work and how people tell stories onto the text in order to make

sense of it.12 A part of this process of fitting the text into one's worldview is identify

ing the narrator (if there is a clearly identifiable one) and deciding what sort of per son that narrator is on the basis of one's referential frames.

Note that the steps of this process differ only in one respect from the detection

of unreliability as Booth describes it. In both cases the reader experiences a moment

of anagnorisis or recognition that literal interpretation fails: (1) the reader notes in

consistencies on the narrator's part, (2) and then makes sense of the initial conun

drum by relating it to other world/literary experience or to what the implied author

actually meant to say; (3) another reading is decided upon; (4) however, in N?n

ning's model the recognition of unreliability is questioned or legitimized with refer

ence to the reader's cultural and individual referential frames that make this

attribution possible. Bowing to the epistemological uncertainty of our age, N?nning

recognizes that every reading is limited and situational, and every reader is poten

tially unreliable. By contrast Booth's model assumes that the classification of a nar

rator as unreliable can be verified when the implied author's irony is recognized as

intended and stable.

The process of attributing unreliability to narrators is highly similar in Booth

and N?nning's models. The following schematic representation reveals that the ele

ments of which their models consist are also nearly identical:

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 99

Booth's Model N?nning's Model

Reader Reader

Narrator Persona-Implied Author Narrator Persona-Totality of Textual Signals

(recourse to the values of the implied author) (recourse to the reader's frames of reference)

In both models three points of view coexist: that of (1) a personified narrator; (2) the

implied author or the fictional world created by the totality of textual signals; and

(3) the reader, who responds to and makes sense of (1) and (2). Again, in both cases

a narrator can only be identified as unreliable if the reader perceives divergences of

value, opinion, perception, and forms of expression between the narrator and the im

plied author or the totality of textual signals. The salient difference between these

models is where the authority to judge a narrator as unreliable lies: Booth's model

gives authority to an implied author whose norms form the basis from which ques tions of reliability can be addressed, whereas N?nning's model assumes the limited

validity of subjective reader response. Another structural difference is that N?n

ning's model allows for a potentially limitless number of textual wholes based on in

dividual readers' responses to the text. Conversely, Booth's model envisions a

singular textual whole that is created from clearly detectable textual signs supplied

by the implied author.

Importantly, both models treat narrators like real persons, though N?nning's does so more questioningly, as he mentions the dangers of projecting human traits onto literary phenomena (Unreliable 21).13 This makes good sense, since both Booth

and N?nning base their models on narrators who act as characters in the stories they tell. The jury remains out on whether heterodiegetic narrators can also be unreliable.14

To develop a typology of unreliable narrators I now want to concentrate on how we characterize narrators like people. Referring to a textual construct as a person

seems justified in this case, since characteristics such as "unreliable," "untrustwor

thy," "unconscious," and "fallible" are ones we apply to individuals. When judging narrators as unreliable, readers treat them like new

acquaintances.15 Readers bring

implicit theories of personality as well as scripts for how narrators behave to every text they read (Wall 30). When approaching narrators such as the Underground Man, it is clear that readers detect unreliability as they might diagnose mental illness:

signs of irregularity are noted, and they are understood within the personal and liter

ary schemata of unreliability. However, many unreliable narrators are not mad mo

nologists but somewhat untrustworthy or simply fallible. How readers respond to

these types of narrators differs, as do their attempts to determine what makes them

unreliable. This leads readers to make different kinds of attributions about fallible

and untrustworthy narrators, as I will now explain.

100 Greta Olson

MODIFYING THE EXISTING MODELS

I want to suggest an amplification of Booth's model of unreliability that will

lead to clarifying our understanding of how unreliability functions and why readers

respond to this phenomenon in different ways. I see Booth's implicit distinction be

tween fallible narrators and untrustworthy ones as highly pertinent.16 Key here is the

insight that untrustworthiness and fallibility occasion varying reader reactions and

strategies. Other theorists who have worked to differentiate between forms of unreli

ability include Lanser (Narrative Act), Hof, Cohn ("Discordant"), and Phelan and

Martin, who describe six types of unreliability, as well as Fludernik ("Defining").

Importantly, all recent models of unreliability, including those of N?nning, Flud

ernik, Phelan and Martin, and Yacobi, stress that narrators cannot be neatly divided

into the categories of unreliable or reliable. Rather, as Phelan and Martin state it:

"narrators exist along a wide spectrum from reliability to unreliability" (96), and

they can become more or less reliable during the course of the stories they tell.

Monika Fludernik has proposed a tripartite model of unreliability. According to

her analysis, narrators can be unreliable because of their "factual inaccuracy," their

"lack of objectivity" as first-person narrators, or their "ideological unreliability"

("Defining" 76-77). In the first case the narrator may lie consciously or may not

have access to accurate information; in the second case, the narrator is subject to the

"epistemological restrictions" (76) typical of homodiegetic narration or may be

morally unreliable (for instance, racist). In the third case the narrator's actions and

evaluations may be consistent to herself but discordant with the "world view" of the

reading audience (77). While its differentiation between lack of factual information,

bias, and ideological disagreement as causes for unreliability is clarifying, Flud

ernik's tripartite model does not distinguish between limitations inherent to ho

modiegetic storytelling and unreliability per se. Furthermore, the first category of

unreliability does not make a distinction between narrators who reliably convey all

of the information they have access to and those who deliberately withhold it. Such

narrators, I think, invite differing attributions about their behavior and different cate

gorizations.

By contrast, Phelan and Martin describe two different ways in which readers

may detect unreliability (and, implicitly, two different general types of unreliable

narrators). They posit an implied author behind the narrator and an "authorial audi

ence" that is "the author's ideal audience" not dissimilar from Booth's postulated reader (108). Audience members either "reject" the narrator's face-value account and

"reconstruct" another more satisfying story, or they "supplement the account" of the

narrator with information he does not give them (92). Using The Remains of the

Day's Stevens as an example of a narrator who vacillates in how reliably he per ceives his own and others' motivations and actions as well as how much he chooses

and is able to report fictional events, the authors describe six types of unreliability. The first three types of unreliability are grouped together on the basis of how the

reader responds to them, namely by replacing the narrator's story with a less contra

dictory account of fictional events, and the second three on the reader's need to am

plify on the narrator's incomplete tale. Regarding the first group, narrators may

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 101

falsely report fictional events ("misreporting"), or make mistakes of perception ("misreading"), or falsely evaluate events ("misregarding"). In the second group nar

rators may evidence unreliability in their not telling enough about what is happening ("underreporting"), their failing to grasp events completely ("underreading"), or

their making incomplete value judgments ("underregarding"). Phelan and Martin's

categorization of six types of unreliability is based on (1) the axes of the narrator's

faulty factual, ethical, and epistemological evaluations, and (2) on the reader's re

sponse to these evaluations.

Taking the lead from Booth's implicit typology of narrators, I differentiate be tween fallible and untrustworthy narrators and follow Phelan and Martin in distin

guishing between reading strategies necessary for making sense of various types of

unreliability. Before describing the difference between narrator fallibility and un

trustworthiness, it appears necessary to consider the general limitations of ho

modiegetic narrators. As inhabitants of their textual worlds, these narrators cannot have metatextual, omniscient knowledge.17 As Stanzel writes, it is the particular quality of "personalized narrators" to demonstrate to us the "biased nature of our ex

perience of reality" (11). Homodiegetic narrators are subject to the epistemological uncertainty of lived experience. Yet they are not necessarily unreliable. Often mys

tery and detective novels feature narrators who conform to the normative values of

their narratives. Such narrators reliably report on whatever informational puzzles they are currently piecing together. Of course, they do not and cannot provide their readers with vital pieces of the puzzle until they themselves have found them out,

typically towards the end of the narrative. Consider Walter Hartright, whose narra

tion begins and ends Wilkie Collins's The Lady in White, or Philip Marlowe in Ray mond Chandler's The Big Sleep. An impoverished gentleman and drawing teacher,

Hartright?the name "heart" "right" says it all?is rewarded for his subdued suffer

ing during the engagement, marriage, and seeming death of his beloved Laura Fair lie as well as for his persistent efforts to solve the mystery of the lady whose figure gives the novel its title. The novel ends with the villains' deaths and Hartright's mar

riage to Laura, the birth of their son, and their inheritance of Limmeridge House and a considerable fortune. Similarly, Marlowe unravels the story of Rusty Regan's dis

appearance in a series of caustic stops and starts, but completely faithfully. Before the denouement in which he tells Vivian Regan how she paid to have her husband's

murder by her little sister hushed up so as to let her father die peacefully, Marlowe

accurately characterizes his narrative style: "I'm not joking, and if I seem to talk in

circles, it just seems that way. It all ties together?everything" (214). Both Hartright and Marlowe have restricted visions of the action. Yet because both report with fac tual accuracy and are in accord with the values of their narratives, I regard them both as reliable.

By contrast, fallible narrators do not reliably report on narrative events because

they are mistaken about their judgments or perceptions or are biased. Fallible narra

tors' perceptions can be impaired because they are children with limited education or

experience, as in Huckleberry Finn', or, as in the case of Marlow from Lord Jim, their

reports can seem insufficient because their sources of information are biased and in

complete. We can imagine circumstances in which fallible narrators like Huck and

102 Greta Olson

Marlow might tell their tales completely and reliably. Applying a longstanding in

sight from social psychology about how individuals make attributions about the rea

sons for people's behavior, I believe that readers regard the mistakes of fallible

narrators as being situationally motivated. That is, external circumstances appear to

cause the narrator's misperceptions rather than inherent characteristics. Readers may

justify the failings of fallible narrators?just as they would tend to justify their own

similar mistakes?on the basis of circumstances that impede them rather than on

their intellectual or ethical deficiencies.18

Conversely, untrustworthy narrators strike us as being dispositionally unreli

able. The inconsistencies these narrators demonstrate appear to be caused by in

grained behavioral traits or some current self-interest. Moll Flanders demonstrates a

consistent tendency to equivocate morally; the Underground Man appears mentally unstable during the entire course of the tale he relates. We surmise that other narra

tors could behave differently (more reliably) in the same narrative situation and that

untrustworthiness is a distinct characteristic of the narrator. Hence, the reactions un

trustworthy narrators elicit in readers differ significantly from those in response to

fallible ones. What the narrator says will be greeted by skepticism and rapidly amended when it is inconsistent.

To illustrate the difference between narrator fallibility and untrustworthiness I

want to analyze two cases of each.19 Huck Finn represents a highly fallible narrator

and Lord Jim's Marlow a slightly fallible one. Tellingly, Booth uses the term "incon

science" to describe Huck's fallibility: "the narrator claims to be naturally wicked

while the author silently praises his virtues behind his back" (Fiction 159). Although Huck is smart as a whip and eminently likable, his perceptions are nonetheless mis

taken because of his age, his superstitions, and his simply not knowing pertinent facts, as well as his as yet literal understanding of the shallow moral norms he has

been exposed to by Miss Watson and her ilk.

A clear case of fallibility concerns the climactic scene in which Huck decides to

"steal Jim out of slavery again" (209). He condemns himself for having been raised

so wickedly that he is not able to do what he knows to be "right" in the eyes of his

white townsfolk, to return Jim to his owner. Yet the larger narrative clearly suggests a normative standard that fully confirms Huck's action and derides the conventional

mores of behavior he chides himself for failing to conform to: Jim is consistently

portrayed as heroic, if uneducated, and represents, perhaps, the only morally sound

adult male figure in the novel. At the end of the novel he comes out of hiding to help nurse Tom Sawyer back to health, and this act results in his being taken captive

again. Similarly, Jim parents Huck by allowing him to sleep through his shifts as

lookout on the raft and teaches Huck ethical standards by telling him that it is "trash"

to try to fool one's friend into thinking that a series of traumatic events was only a

dream (90). A lesser case of fallibility occurs when Huck describes how the widow prays

before meals at the very beginning of the novel. When he complains that "you had to

wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals,

though there warn't really anything the matter with them" (11), Huck, on the one

hand, completely misperceives the nature of the religious ritual. Yet, on the other

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 103

hand, he provides an ironic commentary on the way many individuals actually do

pray before meals.20

Along the range of fallible homodiegetic narrators, Huck Finn appears more

fallible than Marlow. In Lord Jim, Marlow depends on letters, an incomplete text,

highly prejudiced witnesses such as Gentleman Brown (who hates Jim and con

tributed to his death), and Jim's traumatized lover Jewel to piece together the story of

how Jim died. Again Marlow's incomplete narration of the Patusan episode appears to be caused by the circumstance that he was not with Jim at the time of his death

rather than by any internal motivation to conceal narrative events from the reader.

The reader senses that Marlow's perceptions are convincing in themselves, even

though his mental inclusion of Jim as "one of us" and his disappointment at Jim's

having abandoned the sinking Patna certainly color the quality of his storytelling. Yet the information he has access to is questionable. Indeed, much of the drama of

Lord Jim stems from Marlow's faltering efforts to read the character of the young man he studies and tells his audience about. Furthermore, one may reason that had

Marlow witnessed Jim's death, he could have given his dinner audience and the

reader a much more complete and conventionally satisfying account of it.

To determine how fallible a narrator is the reader must ask to what extent the

narrator mistakes the information he has access to and the perceptions he has. Does

the narrator make these mistakes consistently, and can we imagine circumstances in

which the narrator would report infallibly? If we can imagine a grown up Huckle

berry who will know that the widow's "grumbling" is saying grace, and that his de

cision to tear up his letter to Miss Watson was the right one, if we can imagine a

Marlow who, with more information and reflection, could narrate the inchoate mean

ing of Jim's life and death with more clarity, we have good reason to regard the Huck

and the Marlow we encounter as fallible rather than untrustworthy narrators.

To illustrate untrustworthy narration, the speaker of Edgar Allan Poe's "The

Tell-Tale Heart" will serve as an example of a highly untrustworthy narrator and

Moll Flanders as a somewhat untrustworthy one. Like the Underground Man, the

speaker of "The Tell-Tale Heart" begins his tale with a number of inconsistencies.

Poe's narrator insists that his addressee has accused him of madness (always a sure

sign of mental stability): "True!?nervous?very, very dreadfully nervous I had

been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses?not destroyed?not dulled them" (792). To make sense of this narration the

reader will be quick to attribute mental instability and untrustworthiness to its source. The narrator will be diagnosed with pathological untrustworthiness, and the

reader will choose the therapeutic strategy of reading against the grain. However, many other narrators appear only marginally unreliable. Moll Flan

ders has been alternately identified as the eloquent speaker of London's poor or the

object of Daniel Defoe's moral derision. At one point Moll describes her second

foray into property crime when she steals a young girl's necklace: Moll first blames

poverty for making her need to steal from a child (note that some critics question Moll's math); she then regrets that she was insufficiently reformed during her years as a prosperous married woman. She then projects her desire to steal onto her

"prompter, like a true devil," who puts her up to taking the necklace (151). Finally,

104 Greta Olson

she reasons that the child's vain mother is at fault for having dressed the child in such an expensive bauble, and that the family maid is guilty of having not supervised the

child properly by going off to flirt instead. The parents, Moll believes, will learn a

valuable lesson through having had their child's necklace stolen. During the course

of this passage Moll alternately styles herself as a victim, a fallen sinner, and an am

bassador of morality. She makes the weaknesses of others?the mother's vanity, the

maid's amorousness, the devil's prompting?responsible for her crime and not her

self. Clearly, Moll's narrative demands that the reader undertake several interpretive moves to make sense of her contradictions. Repeated episodes of moral equivocation like this one invite the reader to attribute untrustworthiness to Moll as a constant be

havioral trait.

At one end of the spectrum, untrustworthy narrators contradict themselves im

mediately or announce outright that they are insane. At the other end, readers are re

quired to do more "detective" work to determine whether a narrator is trustworthy or

not, and critics remain divided about how to characterize the storyteller (Fludernik,

"Defining" 78). The pertinent question is to what extent the narrator is exposed, or

whether she exposes herself, as dispositionally untrustworthy. Readers attribute in

ternal inconsistency and self-contradiction to narrators they judge to be lacking in

trustworthiness. We predict that they will continue to contradict themselves and take on a reading strategy that questions and revises all that they say.

To my mind the separation of narrators into untrustworthy or fallible applies for

all narrators traditionally labeled unreliable. Supporting this thesis is Phelan's state

ment in a recent defense of the need for an implied author in accounts of unreliabil

ity: "Narrators . . . can be unreliable in two different ways, either by falling short or

by distorting. Narration that falls short is reliable up to a point; narration that distorts

is simply unreliable" ("Can Readers" 6). However, it is also possible for narrators to move from being fallible to being untrustworthy in the course of a narration.

Nonetheless, I suspect that readers will, like Booth, prefer making more straightfor ward attributions of fallibility or untrustworthiness.

CONCLUSION

An analysis of Booth and N?nning's models of unreliable narration shows that

unreliability can only be determined where there are three points of view. The reader

judges the narrator's unreliability based on textual signals, and then moves beyond a

literal reading of the text and attributes fallibility or untrustworthiness to the narrator.

Suspending disbelief, the reader attributes personal qualities of fallibility and trust

worthiness to narrators just as she makes attributions about individuals in other con

texts. Narrators, my analysis has hopefully shown, differ as to whether and to what

degree they are fallible or untrustworthy. Depending on their perceived deficiencies, narrators elicit different responses and require varying reading strategies. When nar

rators are untrustworthy, their accounts have to be altered in order to make sense of

their discrepancies. Fallible narrators by contrast make individual mistakes or leave

open informational gaps that need to be filled in. Untrustworthy narrators meet with

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 105

our skepticism about their characters, whereas fallible narrators are more likely to be

excused for their failures to deliver on the informational goods.

N?nning's singling out reader response as the sole basis for detecting unrelia

bility ignores the discrepancy between conflicting points of view within the text as

well as the reader's sense of being in cahoots with the viewpoint that differs from the

narrator's. Texts featuring untrustworthy narrators?like ironical utterances?have a

"target or victim." The reader "feel[s] drawn into a conspiracy with the speaker"

(Sperber and Wilson 313), here the implied author or those textual signals that give the impression of there being a person behind the narrator of a text. As Booth puts it, in cases of irony (and unreliability) "the speaker is himself the butt of the ironic

point" (Fiction 304). Attributing unreliability to the narrator, the reader recognizes the text's implicit joke and sees that the narrator is not what she proposes to be.

Cases of unreliable narration invite the reader to depart from a literal reading,

something?as Booth and Cohn point out?readers tend to resist. As in cases of

irony, the narrated utterance must be turned over and reinterpreted. A gap opens be

tween the literal and the implied; when the reader detects unreliability, she enters the

gap successfully. Textual signals help her decide whether the narrator is fallible or

untrustworthy. The decision allows the reader to predict whether the narrator is likely to always misreport or is prevented by circumstances from telling the tale straight.

The reader can then assume a strategy by which she can make different types of un

reliable narration comprehensible and render fallible and untrustworthy narrators re

liable in their unreliability.

ENDNOTES

1. Several individuals have kindly guided me through earlier versions of this text. However, I need to

particularly thank Monika Fludernik, in whose colloquium on narratology the idea for this paper was

conceived, and Ansgar Niinning, who has graciously supported my continuing dialogue with his

work.

2. The implied author represents a tool with which the critic can talk about the values, linguistic pecu

liarities, and worldview of a particular text?as they can be documented in a text?without referring to the personality of the historical person who wrote the book. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beard

sley called this type of misreading "the intentional fallacy."

3. Psychological experiments demonstrate that the more difficult it is to achieve membership status in a

particular group, the more group identity is valued by the individual members (Aronson and Mills). It

would be interesting to study whether textual difficulty (i.e., ambivalence, complexity, syntactical

play, multiperspectivity) represents a form of initiation: those readers who are admitted into the

"group" of competent readers (Booth writes in the plural form) are all the more gratified by their

comprehension, depending on how difficult it was to achieve.

4. Fludernik {Fictions 58-65) provides a very helpful discussion of how the adoption of conventional

sender- and speech-oriented linguistic models of communication in literary studies has led to the ne

glect of recipient-oriented ones.

5. "I am trying to be an American writer and claim only the same rights that other American writers

enjoy. On the other hand, my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many

things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him" (317).

106 Greta Olson

6. For instance, Booth writes that the narrator of James Joyce's Ulysses should not be termed unreliable:

"to be undependable in this sense is not identical with being what I have called unreliable; most un

reliable narrators are dependable in the sense of being consistent" {Fiction 300).

7. Pragmatically, these definitions leave ample room for interpretation, as is documented in the various

translations of the term into German such as "reliability," "believability," "truthfulness," and "trust

worthiness" (Niinning, Unreliable 11).

8. A minor point here is that Booth also names Fleda Vetch, the reflector figure, filter, or focalizer (the reader may choose her preferred terminology) from Henry James's The Spoils ofPoynton as an ex

ample of an unreliable narrator {Fiction 159).

9. This is my translation of Niinning throughout. English-speaking readers can refer to a lecture that

Niinning delivered on the same subject in 1997, which was published in 1999 ("Reconceptualizing").

Unfortunately, this lecture does not contain the helpful list of textual signals of unreliability or the

suggestions for further research areas concerning this topic that N?nning's introduction to the mono

graph does.

10. The vehemence with which Niinning attacks the inconsistencies of the implied author model of unre

liability might lead one to wonder if he does not in fact wish to accuse Booth of being something of

an unreliable narrator himself. For the pros and cons of the implied author, see, for instance, Chatman

(74-89), who is pro, and Niinning ("Renaissance"), who is con. Lanser ("[Im]plying") offers a bal

anced view and Phelan responds specifically to N?nning's critique of the term ("Can Readers"). Whether or not one adopts the model of an implied author as a reading strategy, one has to infer a

point of view other than the narrator's in order to attribute unreliability.

11. This list is based in part on the contributions of Gaby Allrath and Dagmar Busch to N?nning's mono

graph. The similarity between it and Booth's list of signals for textual irony is evident.

12. N?nning cites Culler on this process: "At the moment when we propose that a text means something other than what it appears to say we introduce, as hermeneutic devices which are supposed to lead us

to the truth of the text, models which are based on our expectations about the text and the world"

(157; qtd. in Unreliable 24).

13. Fludernik points out that personified narrators are textual illusions: "the narrative instance Erz?hler is

a discourse-theoretical construct and not an empirical reality" {Fictions 453).

14. Manfred Jahn, Dornt Cohn, and Tamar Yacobi explore the possibility of heterodiegetic narrator unre

liability in recent essays, as does Cohn in The Distinction of Fiction, chapter 8. I would agree with

Cohn and Yacobi that the same inferences about character, trustworthiness, and personality can be ap

plied to narrators who do not take part in their stories. The degree to which these disembodied voices

appear to be part of full-fleshed characters determines the reader's perception of whether they can be

thought of as fallible and trustworthy. The less personalized the narrative voice is, I would argue, the

more inappropriate it is to infer unreliability. For instance, in many modern and postmodern texts in

which there is no apparent narrator viewpoint, such as in Samuel Beckett's short stories in Six

Residua, questions of reliability become mute.

15. Phelan makes explicit the fluid movement between the reader's analysis of character (what I call per

sonality) and the narrator's discourse: "Thus, interpreters will examine the homodiegetic narrator's

character?including such aspects of character as motives, values, beliefs, interests, psychology, race,

class, and gender (to the extent these matters can be inferred from events and descriptions)?for clues

to the narration and the character's narration for clues to the character" {Narrative 111).

16. In his earlier lecture on unreliability, N?nning does describe a separation between fallible and unreli

able narrators and considers adopting this differentiation ("Reconceptualizing" 68). Yet in the intro

duction to the monograph, he argues that this distinction fails to clear up the problems of imprecision inherent in Booth's definition and its usage {Unreliable 12).

17. It goes without saying that as textual illusions, these narrators appear to inhabit their fictional worlds.

Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators 107

18. The fundamental attribution error refers to the general tendency to attribute the causes of behaviors

to personal dispositions rather than external, situational circumstances. The actor-observer bias de

scribes how actors tend to look for the causes of their own behaviors in external circumstances rather

than in their own personal characteristics. A similar bias occurs in causal perceptions about the be

haviors of members and non-members of groups. H. H. Kelley's notion of the covariation principle

proposes a model for making attributions about the causes of given behaviors on the basis of different

classes of information (distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency).

19. Similarly, Dorrit Cohn differentiates between "a factual kind of unreliability" and "an ideological kind that is attributed to the narrator who is biased or confused" ("Discordant" 307). She concentrates

on the latter in her essay, calling this type of narration "discordant" to denote the lack of harmony be

tween the narrator and the story she tells.

20. I owe this insight to James Phelan and his critical reading of this text.

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