ever, those bonding and estranging effects operate primarily in the implied
author–actual audience relationship rather than primarily in the narrator–
authorial audience relationship, as they do in unreliable narration.
Any member of the actual audience is, of course, free to decide that any
narration is deficient, especially along the axis of ethics, because any reader
can resist or reject the ethical values that undergird an author’s narrative. But
as a rhetorical theorist, I am especially interested in two kinds of deficient nar-
ration, the first exclusive to nonfiction and the second appearing in both fic-
tion and nonfiction. The first kind, which I call deficient referential narration,
itself has two subtypes, the inadvertent and the deceptive. The second kind I
call deficient intratextual narration. (For other treatments of character narra-
tion in which there is a discrepancy between the representation and external
reality, see Hansen as well as Shen and Xu.)
Deficient referential narration involves misreporting, misinterpreting, and
misevaluating about characters, places, and events referred to in nonfiction
narrative. In other words, deficient referential narration involves discrepancies
between the representation of extratextual reality in nonfiction and that real-
ity itself. Again, given reporting’s fundamental role in narrative, the greatest
deficiency involves misreporting. Inadvertent deficiencies occur in situations
where the author intends to report, interpret, or evaluate the external real-
ity accurately but fails to do so. For example, an on-the-scene reporter of a
developing news story typically will seek to report everything as accurately as
possible but because of limited information may misreport, misinterpret, or
misevaluate it. In cases where that happens, the newscaster’s authorial audi-
ence is invited to accept her account as reliable, but as the additional infor-
mation comes in, the actual audience will decline that invitation. Inadvertent
deficiencies may have bonding or estranging effects, depending on the reasons
for the deficiency.
Deceptive deficiencies occur in cases such as James Frey’s A Million Lit-
tle Pieces, where the author deliberately misreports events and the authorial
audience is not supposed to detect the misreporting. Once the actual audi-
ence becomes aware of the deception—usually through one or more read-
ers comparing the author’s account to other evidence about the extratextual
reality—the actual audience will opt out of the authorial audience. Decep-
tive deficiencies typically have estranging effects on the implied author–actual
audience relationship.
Intratextual deficient narration, as I noted, can occur in fiction or in non-
fiction, and it reveals its deficiency through some inconsistency or other flaw
in the overall design of the narration. To put it another way, intratextual defi-
cient narration is deficient in relation to the terms set by its own larger nar-
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