A Study Of The Unreliable Narration In The Robber Bride

In traditional literary works,the narrator is often regarded as the author’s megaphone,who conveys a stable and unified value to the readers.Since the 20 th century,the historical and cultural context as well as the interpretive strategies within literature have changed,following which the author’s authority collapsed,and the status of readers has been continuously improved.The narrator’s own voice begins to be heard in the works.Therefore," unreliable narration " is increasingly being valued in both author’s writing and researches of narratology.As the eighth novel by the famous Canadian writer Margaret Atwood,The Robber Bride is rewritten based on Grimm’s fairy tale The Robber Groom.In addition to subverting the gender of the villain "groom",more importantly,Atwood adopted an unreliable narrative strategy to deconstruct the reliable narrative of the victim "bride".This paper consists of three parts: introduction,main text and conclusion.In the introduction,it introduces the writing concept of Atwood and his work The Robber Bride and reviews the related researches at home and abroad.The research ideas and structural arrangements of this paper are also be presented in this part.The main text is divided into three chapters.In the first chapter,it focuses on text of the work to analyze the specific strategies for creating narrative deviations from the perspectives of vision,sound,and chronotope.In the second chapter,guided by James Phelan’s theory,it focuses on the reader’s narrative judgment in a historical and cultural context and illustrates how readers gradually distance themselves from the narrator in interpretation,ethics and aesthetic judgments.In the third chapter,the textual significance constructed by the unreliable narration in the three aspects of trauma therapy,identity and national metaphor is analyzed,with considering the cultural trauma theory and identity theory,as well as the author’s intention and reader’s interpretation.In conclusion,unreliable narration,as a strategy for constructing and interpreting texts,involves the discourse competition of multiple subjects such as the sender and receiver of the text.Adopting an unreliable narration in The Robber Bride,Atwood actively engages the reader’s sense of participation in reading and starts a dialogue between reader,author and narrator,finally makes the meaning of the work best presented.