The Generation Of Unreliable Narration In Fiction

Unreliable narration is one that deviates from the norms of the implied author. It has become a hot topic of narratological studies in the past two decades. Substantial theoretical developments have been achieved since W. C. Booth's conceptualization and theorization of unreliable narration.The "rhetoric school" and the "cognitive school" represent two major theoretical directions of studies on unreliable narration. Both schools have developed scholarly insights, but no successful efforts have been made to combine them due to their basic theoretical differences. Inspired by Tamar Yacobi's "genetic mechanism" and Shen Dan's schematization, this paper proposes a "genetic mechanism" in the broad sense to provide common descriptions of the theories developed both schools, hoping to create a starting-point for integrating them.Navigating through the course of previous studies on unreliable narration, this paper looks at Yacobi's "genetic mechanism" critically, affirming its merits and criticizing its deficiencies, and then proposes a "genetic mechanism" in the broad sense. Based on theoretical deductions and textual analyses, this paper looks at the three basic components of the theory of unreliable narration, namely, the implied author, unreliable narration, and textual meanings related to unreliable narration. The analyses of this paper indicate that the formation of the implied author and its norms is both a result of the author encoding process and the reader decoding process. Textual generation of unreliable narration is a result of the author's choice of narrative strategies, including the choice of narrative person and perspective, the use of multiple internal perspectives, and the depiction of characters. In his reading process, a reader may identify unreliable narration on the "facts/events","knowledge/perception", and "values/judgments" axes as summarized by James Phelan. Based on his cognition of the implied author and unreliable narration, the reader can take a step forward to interpret textual meanings accordingly.In final analysis, the "genetic mechanism" in the broad sense proposed herein puts aside the theoretical differences of the rhetoric and cognitive schools, and seeks breakthroughs where they complement each other, providing a possibility for their integration. This may serve as a starting point for the development of a theory that combines their respective insights and achievements.