Study On Unreliable Narration

An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable. The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces the reader to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.However, we find studies in this subject mainly concentrates in the discussion"what is unreliable narration?"or"which types unreliable narration can be divide into?"Followed Booth, those theories deemed that unreliable narration causes two reading reaction: Irony and Aesthetic Distance. In fact, we find it more complicated.This article plans to research each theory linked unreliable narration, and point out each theory's deficiency, and propose that we can Combine Rhetorical Narratology with Cognitive Narratology when analyzing the text. Second, through to research unreliable narration, this article increased aesthetic identity and Theseus Impulse which both the effect of text reading. Third, we will mainly analyze Chinese text, for example, Shaanxi Opera and Death Mourning, that will avoid the primarily tendency of only researching abroad novels. Finally, this article plans to summary four kind of reading reaction.