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 narration function within fictional texts, and how do readers respond to these kinds of narration? In this essay I will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booth's introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narration as a function of irony, since this formulation remains the leading model for unreliable narration. I will then describe how Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Nünning for disregarding the reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of the implied author. Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text. Nünning, I argue, overstates his case and ignores the structural similarities between 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 perceptions 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 between fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit. Drawing on new research on unreliability, I suggest that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and trustworthiness. ¹

Booth's Model

Booth first gave readers a handle on how to think about narrators like Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Insisting that he suffers from liver disease while admitting 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 diseased. 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 perceptions 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 provides 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 passage 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 collusion 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 collusion, 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...