Unreliable Narration Of Male Characters In Alice Munro's Lives Of Girls And Women

Alice Munro is the first Canadian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature,and is claimed as a master of contemporary short story.Lives of Girls and Women,the only novel by Munro so far,tells the story of how Del grows from a naive little girl to an independent and strong woman writer.It also depicts women's bitter experience of self-growth in a still much patriarchal society and expresses Munro's genuine concern for equality between men and women.This thesis draws on Wayne C.Booth's concept of unreliable narration and James Phelan's classification of unreliable narration,with focus on three axes:the axis of facts/events,the axis of knowledge/perception and the axis of ethics/evaluation,and analyzes the male characters in the novel.These male characters' unreliable narration involves in Uncle Benny's unreliable tales,Uncle Bill's childhood memory,Uncle Craig's historical writing,Jerry Storey's high IQ,Mr,Chamberlian's emotional choice and Garnet French's religious belief.By virtue of close reading,the thesis finds that unreliability is the main characteristic of those male images,and that Munro's choice of the narrative method of unreliable narration is not only to depict men,create irony and show the heroine's growth,but also to convey her own ideological stance.