In most work on unreliable narration since Booth’s coining of the term
in 1961, theorists and critics have focused on this second end of the spec-
trum. Think of the common examples of unreliable narrators: Ford Madox
Ford’s Dowell in The Good Soldier, Ring Lardner’s Whitey in “Haircut,” Wil-
liam Faulkner’s Jason in The Sound and the Fury, Henry James’s governess
in one reading of The Turn of the Screw, Ian McEwan’s Jack in The Cement
Garden. There are good reasons for this focus: using one text to convey sub-
stantial gaps between a narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations and
those of the implied author is no mean feat—nor is being able to account for
the dynamics of that feat, as the history of theoretical quarrels about unreli-
ability would suggest.^3
But when we shift to the rhetorical principle that unreliable narration is a
resource that authors can use in different ways on different occasions for dif-
ferent purposes, we become more cognizant of the wide range of its possible
effects on readerly response. The distinction between bonding and estranging
unreliability helps to identify that range.
The terms estranging and bonding refer to the consequences of the unreli-
ability for the relations between the narrator and the authorial audience. In
estranging unreliability, the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports,
interpretations, or evaluations and those of the authorial audience leave these
two participants in the communicative exchange distant from one another—
in a word, estranged. Or to put it another way, in estranging unreliability, the
authorial audience recognizes that adopting the narrator’s perspective would
mean moving far away from the implied author’s, and in that sense, the adop-
tion would be a net loss for the author-audience relationship. When Lardner’s
Whitey says that Jim Kendall was “kind of rough, but a good fella at heart,”
he is misreading and misregarding. As rhetorical readers substitute a much
harsher view of Jim, they also increase their ethical and interpretive distance
from Whitey.
In bonding unreliability, the discrepancies between the implied author’s
and the narrator’s reports, interpretations, or evaluations have the paradoxi-
cal result of reducing the interpretive, affective, or ethical distance between
the narrator and the authorial audience. In other words, although the autho-
rial audience recognizes the narrator’s unreliability, that unreliability includes
some communication that the implied author—and thus the authorial audi-
ence—endorses. When Stevens writes at the end of The Remains of the Day
that “in bantering lies the key to human warmth” (Ishiguro 245), he is under-
regarding because he does not see that human warmth depends on much more
- For a sample of these debates, see especially Cohn, Ansgar Nünning, Vera Nünning,
Hansen, Olson, Petterson, Zerweck, and Phelan (Living to Tell).
100 • CHAPTER 5