H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e8 4There are unreliable narrators as well as omniscient ones. The
governess who narrates Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is almost
certainly insane. James is playing a devious game with the reader,
providing us with enough grounds to credit the governess’s account
while dropping sufficient sly hints to suggest that it is not to be
trusted. We have seen already that Nelly Dean’s narrative in Wuthering
Heights is not entirely dependable. Jane Eyre delivers a tale tinged
with pride, resentment, envy, anxiety, aggression and self- interest.
Some of Joseph Conrad’s narrators draw attention to the limited
nature of their own powers of interpretation. They may have only a
fitful, confused sense of what is going on in the stories they tell. The
narrator of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes is a case in point, as are the
storytellers of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Thomas
Mann’s Doctor Faustus. It is possible that such narrators grasp less of
the significance of the story than the reader does herself. We can see
what they cannot see, and perhaps why they cannot see it.
A notoriously unreliable storyteller is the hero of Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, who never seems to learn
anything from his travels, is a boneheaded narrator as well as an
unreliable one. All boneheaded narrators are unreliable, but not all
unreliable narrators are boneheaded. Gulliver acts as the focus of
the book’s satire, but in a neat double- tactic he is also the target of
it. He can be pathetically keen to identify with the outlandish crea-
tures he finds himself among. In Lilliput, for example, he takes on
the standards of this nation of tiny creatures far too eagerly. At one
point, he hotly denies the charge of having had sex with a female
Lilliputan who is only a few inches high. He also fails to raise the
obvious impossibility of this in his own defence. He is also fool-
ishly proud of the title these midgets bestow on him. Gulliver, in
short, is something of a gull.