Unreliable Narrative Studies

Since the theory of unreliable narration proposed by Wayne Booth,unreliable narrative has been one of the focuses of academic discussion.It is unreliable that the narration of the narrator,when the narration of the narrator deviates from the implicit author’s stipulation.However,due to Booth’s own reasons,he did not explain the unreliable narration clearly,which caused more confusion and caused in-depth discussion and research in the academic circle.Due to the different springboard,there are two schools in the academic circle--the rhetoric school and the cognitive school.The rhetoric school thinks that the unreliable narration should be judged from the distance between the implied author and the narrator,while the cognitive school thinks that the unreliable narration should be judged from the angle of the reader’s interpretation.Therefore,there are irreconcilable contradictions between the two schools.However,both the rhetoric school and the cognitive school are discussing unreliable narration in first-person narrators,but neither of them deny the existence of unreliable narration in third-person narrators,and the academic circle has not conducted in-depth research on unreliable narration in third-person.Through the study of the unreliable narrative theories of the two schools,it is found that the unreliable narrators exist in the third-person narrative text,and the unreliable narrative theory can and must extend its research object to the third-person narrative text.There should be at least three aspects of unreliable narration in third-person: first,the change of the narrator’s perspective--either the omniscient perspective becomes limited,or the limited perspective becomes omniscient,or the shift of perspective--will lead to the unreliability of the narrator.Second,according to the genetic mechanism which put forward by Jacobi,the third-person text itself can form unreliable narration,and the unreliable can be caused by the author’s error or intentional.Third,Dan Shen thinks that in some modern narrative text,there are two kinds of narrative process,explicit and implicit.When the ironic effect appearing between the explicit narrative process and the implicit narrative process,the implicit narrative process actually is an unreliable narrative at the same time.The significance of research on unreliable narration in third-person is that it can broaden the unreliable narration theory field,fill the "blind spots" in the study of unreliable narration,unreliable narration is one of the common narrative strategy of the modern writer.Unreliable narration maybe become a common phenomenon of modern novel text,and the study of unreliable narration is likely to become an important method for the study of modern narrative strategies.