same relationship between the character narrator’s telling functions and her
character functions. Indeed, attending to the variable relationship between
these functions is crucial to understanding why reliable and unreliable narra-
tion are not binary opposites but convenient shorthands, each encompassing
a range of character narration. To put this point another way, just how authors
adopt the filter of an ontologically distinct character can vary from one occa-
sion to the next precisely because authors may give more or less prominence
to the filter itself and because they may use the teller’s functions of reporting,
interpreting, and evaluating in different combinations—sometimes one may
be prominent, sometimes two, and sometimes all three. In unreliable narra-
tion, the filter is always thick (the distance between implied author and nar-
rator depends on the filter introducing some distortion of the implied author’s
take on things), but in reliable narration, the thickness of the filter can vary.
Consequently, the nature and effects of any instance of reliable narration will
depend to a large degree on the specific interaction of the thickness of the filter
with the particular narrating function(s). Nevertheless, I find it useful to iden-
tify three main subtypes of reliable narration: restricted narration, convergent
narration, and mask narration.^2
On the spectrum that goes from unreliability on one end (the left) to reli-
ability on the other (the right), I locate restricted narration in the middle,
because it is fundamentally reliable, yet its effects point to its affinities with
both unreliable narration and other subtypes of reliable narration. In restricted
narration, the implied author limits the character narrator’s function to reli-
able reporting and uses both the reliability and the restriction to convey inter-
pretations or evaluations that the character narrator remains unaware of. In
restricted narration, the narrating filter of the character’s mimetic function
sometimes becomes thin, as the implied author directs primary attention to
other characters or foregrounds the activity of the experiencing-I. Indeed, in
some passages, the narration could seem to be coming from an undramatized
noncharacter narrator. As I note in chapter 11, Mark Twain sometimes restricts
Huck Finn’s narration in this way. At other times, however, an author will keep
the narrating filter thick, as Frank McCourt does with Frankie throughout
Angela’s Ashes (see chapter 11 for a specific example). A good rule of thumb is
that the more the author wants to keep the focus on the character narrator’s
experience and the more naïve that character narrator is, the more likely the
filter will be thick.
Further to the right along the spectrum, I locate convergent narration.
In convergent narration, the implied author’s, the character narrator’s, and
- In Living to Tell about It, I identify both restricted narration and mask narration, but I
do not place them along the spectrum I propose here.
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