James Phelan's Unreliable Narration Theory

With the development of narratology,unreliable narration theory that covers a wide range,has established a relatively complete system from the presentation to the theoretical monographic study,in the past 30 years.However,in the process of the development of unreliable narration theory,there is also a stereotyped and programmed understanding of the concept of unreliable narration,which leads to the absolute opposition between reliable and unreliable narration.Moreover,there is a lack of attention to how unreliable narrative strategies work,and what rhetorical effects unreliable narratives can have.As the representative of the post-classical rhetoric narratology,James Phelan once again explored and expanded the unreliable narrative theory on the basis of the predecessors.The study of Phelan's unreliable narrative theory in this paper is to review some aspects of narratology theory,and rethink some issues that seem to be the last word,so as to consolidate the building of unreliable narrative theory and make new breakthroughs in theoretical research at the same time.The theory of unreliable narration came into people's view in the20 th century,but the phenomenon of unreliable narration has a long history.This paper explores the reasons for the emergence of unreliable narration from the transformation of traditional literary concepts,clarifies the process of unreliable narration theory from classical narratology to post-classical narratology,and analyzes and summarizes the problems solved by unreliable narration theory from its emergence to the peak of development as well as new intractable diseases.It tries to grasp the integrity of unreliable narration in order to deeply analyze Phelan's unreliable narration theory.Aiming to deeply understand the theory,fullyunderstand the theory,dig out the innovation points of the theory and summarize the shortcomings of the theory,this paper is devoted to the analysis of Phelan's unreliable narrative theory in his whole narrative theory system and the comparison with other narratologists' unreliable narrative theory.This research is inevitably related to many concepts and theories in narratology theory,such as the implied author,same-story narration,fixed perspective,double-voice discourse,author's readers,ethical positioning,and so on.And it mainly discusses Phelan's unreliable narration theory from the following aspects: the core concept of unreliable narration-"implied author",the classification of unreliable narration,the implementation strategy of unreliable narration and reading generation.Firstly Phelan's unreliable narration theory emphasizes the necessity of the existence of the implied author and classifies the unreliable narration strategy as the discourse level.However,he broke through the limitation of formalism and put the author's readers and ethics into unreliable narration,believing that the unreliable narration process is a dynamic cycle.It is also quite insightful that Phelan has presented the way of judging the reliability of narrators and the analysis of the rhetorical effect produced by unreliable narration.