Telling Between The Lies

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English chivalric romance in late 14th-century.As one of the best known Arthurian stories,it draws on the medieval chivalric tradition to relates a classic fable that involves a hero who proceeds a quest to prove worthy of himself.This thesis applies unreliable narration,the notion from narrative studies,to analyze the reliability of the narrators in this poem,aiming to enrich the researches of the literary critics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the unreliable narration of characters in narrative studies.In the beginning,the thesis introduces the text and the Gawain Poet,and reviews the existing studies at home and abroad.Then the unreliable narration in the text is discussed in the following chapters.The first chapter analyses the source of unreliable narration and points out the fictionality of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the absolutism of unreliable narration.Wayne Booth's narrative views are applied to investigate the implied author.With respect to the author's participation,the implied author is the formal author in the Gawain Poet's certain writing style;as for the reader's participation,the implied author is a profile of a minstrel conducted in the reader's mind.The second chapter is the textual analysis of unreliable narration.The unreliable narration of Sir Gawain,the Green Knight and Lady Bertilak is discussed based on James Phelan's three axes of facts/events,values/judgments and knowledge/perception.The unreliability of a narration along the facts/events axis refers to the deception or concealment of objective reality,the unreliable narration along the axis of values/judgments exposes the conceptual and ethical defects of a narrator whose remarks are not desirable to the reader,and the unreliable narration along the axis of knowledge/perception is caused by a narrator's lack of understanding of himself and the circumstances due to limits of the condition.The third chapter analyzes the effect of unreliable narration.In the frame of secondary narration,the juxtaposition of the characters' narration and the author's narration generates conflicts which give birth to structural irony and dramatic irony,meanwhile the reliability of different characters varies at the same time and the reliability of the same character also changes at different time.Through unreliable narration,the poet acknowledges the reconciliation between traditional morals and secular humanity,and the multidimensional representation of Lady Bertilak's narration also shows the concerns for women's status and voice.The Gawain Poet,through the implied author's image,constructs the narrative norms in this poem with certain preference for values,ideologies and performance of characters.The unreliable narration of Sir Gawain,the Green Knight and Lady Bertilak provides narrative motivation for the plots while readers come to a privity with the implied author and obtain reading pleasure by discovering the lies of these narrators.As a work at the turn of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,Sir Gawain and the Green Knight manifests the zeitgeist in then society's narrative literature and provides a textual basis for the applied critics of contemporary narrative studies.