The Narrator In Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric Of Fiction

Composers of texts present a biased attitude to the events, personalities or situations represented. In various texts such as Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and Leunig’s cartoon “Yet another picture with the wrong caption”, the composers bias is evident even though conflicting perspectives towards the personality are presented.

An unreliable narrator is a character who is telling a story, but is not completely accurate or credible due to problems with the character 's mental state or maturity. The unreliable narrator holds a distorted view of the events taking place. This distortion gives readers a chance to offer their own interpretations to the story being told. Unreliable narration is valuable to the reader and satisfying to the author because the audience must look beyond what the narrator is portraying and view all the elements of the read to understand the author 's message. The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are great examples of unreliable narration.

Sometimes an author uses an untruthful person in their writings, called an unreliable narrator. In the stories by Poe, he used a such narrator to add elements of humor and suspense. For example in “The Raven”, the untruthful narrator states, “Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, though its answer little meaning-little relevancy

What makes a narrator unreliable? According to The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, an unreliable narrator is a character whose interpretation of events is different from the author’s. (Meyer,2014,195). It is a character who tells the reader a story that cannot be taken at face value. This may be because the point of view character is insane, lying, deluded or for any number of other reasons. ("What is an Unreliable Narrator? ," 2016, para. 1). In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” there is an unreliable narrator. What makes the narrator unreliable in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman is her mixed views on what is happening around her, her trustworthiness, and her mental health issues.

An unreliable narrator is a narrator that necessarily cannot be trusted by the way they talk, and or the way they describe the way certain events occurred. You cannot believe everything an unreliable narrator says. Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are unreliable because they are both mentally ill or have a serious problem with drinking. When reading a story you want to know all the details correctly and an unreliable narrator can change your understanding of the story, which both of the narrators do in the two short stories. The narrator's show a lot of evidence that they are both unreliable because of their sicknesses.

In fact, the technique Vonnegut uses to conceal the truth is called an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is when the reader cannot believe what the narrator is saying. An unreliable narrator gives the reader false information but acts like it is true.

In the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” the protagonist and narrator Neal describes himself as follows: “My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people” (141). In saying this, Neal sets up a self-aware yet self-diminishing representation of himself. Seemingly, Neal (who is a ghost in “Good Old Neon”) understands his hamartia, or tragic flaw, as inauthenticity. However, a closer reading of Neal’s choice of structure and language in his narration reveals his possession of a fraudulent and insincere characterization. I argue that Neal is purposefully an unreliable narrator and that the reason Neal is fraudulent is to “come across someone who is [his] match and can’t be fooled;” put another way, Neal is testing the insight, or what he refers to as the ‘firepower,’ of the reader (155, 147). Wallace’s reasoning for constructing a fraudulent narrator, then, is to illustrate that, even in death, Neal is incapable of escaping his need to try to create a certain impression of himself.

A unreliable narrator is someone who lies and deceives, the reader. In addition to that a narrator who is insane is also a unreliable narrator. In the short stories that we have read, including Strawberry Spring, by Stephen King where a mentally ill college student starts going on a killing spree during the strawberry spring where the winter warms and there is a lot of fog.The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is which is about a hallucinating woman in a large estate where she is being held by her husband and being captivated in a room for her 0“sickness” of having oppressive thinking and ideas., and A Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe which is about a madman who watched a old man sleep for 7 days straight in the night and then killed him on the 8th because of his “vulture eye”. All of the narrators are mentally insane, therefore rendering each narrator unreliable. Each of which being in their own way. The most unreliable narrator is from A Tell Tale heart by Edgar Allen Poe because he is in denial about his mental health and rationalizes criminal behavior.

While doing some research on psychological criticism, I found that Arnold Friend in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates and notorious murderer Charles Schmid of The Pied Piper of Tucson by Don Moser have characteristics of being a psychopath, motive for killing, similar comparisons of innocence taken by an evil mind, and how Oates wrote her story based upon Schmid’s personality. Psychological criticism as explained in Retellings by M.B. Clarke and A.G. Clarke states “psychological criticism looks at internal influences on an author’s creation and our reception of it…whether the words and images can be read symbolically” (Clarke A-46). Throughout the paper, I will be addressing the psychological criticism of the schools of literary criticism from Retellings. I will be introducing a fictional character and a non-fictional character, a long with their characteristics, comparisons between Oates character with Moser’s, and ideology based upon the non-fictional character.

“Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” – This story starts out in 2nd person POV, “for I must tell you that Sarah was very homely” (1). The POV switches between 3rd person and 2nd person, depending on if the reader is following the action through the characters or listening to the narrator talk directly to the reader. “No, that’s not exactly true…” (7) he says, and we realize that the narrator may not exactly know what is going on or doesn’t want to tell us the truth. He says, “I’m likely to tell it falsely” (7). We can recognize him as an unreliable narrator.

The most unreliable narrator is Springheel Jack in the story “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King. Strawberry spring is about a young man who goes around killing young women at his school but due to his split personality disorder (schizophrenia) he has no memory of committing these crimes. The narrator in “The yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte perkins is more reliable do to her being to informing and descriptive throughout the story she is does a great job

In William Faulkner’s speech at University High School in Mississippi in 1951, he convinces his audience through a motivational tone and through various rhetorical devices that they are able to change the world. At the end of the speech, the goal is achieved in which Faulkner convinces the students to believe him. One rhetorical device used in the speech by Faulkner is diction. Words like “courage and endurance and sacrifice” are chosen to create a motivational tone to convince the audience.

Flannery O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” and Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers,” both authors discuss the element of truth in their essays on fiction, however in O’Connor’s blueprint to writing fiction she states that the writer should dive into the truth in their stories with fiction. This is a contrast to Nabokov’s ideology, because he says that “Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives,” (Nabokov). This contrast in their essays presents a difference in O’Connor’s and Nabokov’s view on the element of truth in fiction.

Outsiders believe that they are better equipped to provide objective accounts of the stories, but insiders claim that this leads to faulty recounts of the stories (Innes, 2009,

The reading posits that the critics were also skeptical about the accuracy of the conversation in the memoir. The professor