Unreliable Narrator

The present study intends to examine the reconstruction of truth through unreliable narration in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (2011). In the process of seeking a fiction in which the narrator is manipulated by the authorial voice to self-refutation, it finds Barnes’ fiction to the purpose. As such, we contend that Barnes resorts to unreliable voices to make his readers suspect the truth of his narrative. In addition to the unreliability of the narrator, the reader is also aware of a cunning voice that is not present in the fiction as the voice commenting on the narrator’s words, but as a scheming intelligence distorting the narrator’s integral sequence of events. This study wants to argue that such a voice can itself be established within the novel as unreliable. To this end, a narratological analysis will be conducted in two stages. The first will focus on the level of the story, mainly on the position of the narrator, to suggest that the narrator gives us three main reasons to doubt his reliability: his age, dementia, and addiction to alcohol.  The second stage is going to concentrate on the level of the text to examine the role of the implied author. It will ultimately show that the implied author is an unreliable voice that further twists the narrator’s accounts.

This is a comparative study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net . The main focus is on the role of trauma in the creation of unreliable narrators. Both Sartre and Murdoch have witnessed the horrors of World War II and it seems that their narratives are affected by such a terrible event. The characters look traumatized and suffer from the burden of the past which has never left them alone. In other words, past events have formed their identity and have rewritten their personality under the situation of World War II. Here, with the help of Wayne C. Booth’s theory of unreliable narrator, the narrators of the selected novels are scrutinized at the social and political contexts of the novels. Accordingly, considering this context and its consequent trauma, the research tries to reveal the presence and function of the unreliable narrators in the selected literary works.