The Struggle For Identity: An Analysis Of The Unreliable Narration In The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks is a distinguished Scottish writer,who is famous for outstanding creativity and fertile imagination.The Wasp Factory is Banks' first mainstream novel which not only brings fame and success to the writer but also gains popularity among readers.This thesis is intended to explore the unreliable narration in The Wasp Factory by adopting James Phelan's theory of unreliable narration.Firstly,the thesis investigates the narrator Frank's unreliability,who wears a reliable mask at the beginning of the novel.Frank loses his credits on the axis of facts and events because he withholds his real gender,the crucial information,in his telling,misreports his mental state and underestimates his father's ability.Frank's unreliability is also exposed on the axis of knowledge and perception for he makes incomplete or false interpretations of his killing people and torturing animals.On the axis of ethics and values,Frank is influenced by distorted value system so that he is unable to make correct evaluations.Secondly,the thesis analyzes the narrative progression in The Wasp Factory.The intersection of instabilities and tensions promotes the narrator's ethics and values to move closer to the implied author's norms and reduces the distance between the narrator and readers.Frank's unreliability gradually transforms from estranging unreliability into bonding unreliability.Finally,based on the analysis of the narrator's unreliability and the narrative progression,the thesis tries to interpret Iain Banks' s intensions to adopt the strategy of unreliable narration.By using the unreliable narration in the novel,the implied Banks not onlytries to achieve his rhetorical purposes,but also aims to appeal for attention and concerns to those marginalized people in our society.In conclusion,this thesis argues that by the exposure of the narrator's unreliability,Iain Banks appeals to readers to give more attention and concerns to those marginalized people in our society and to understand their struggle and suffering.Banks also hopes to offer help to them to reconstruct identity and to step out of the dilemma.