CHAPTER 12
Reliable, Unreliable, and Deficient
Narration
TOWARD A RHETORICAL POETICS
T
HIS CHAPTER brings together in one short space the rhetorical view
of reliable, unreliable, and deficient character narration in both fiction
and nonfiction that I began to develop in Living to Tell about It and have
elaborated on in this book.^1 Readers of those previous discussions will recog-
nize some repetition here, but I hope that most readers will find the repetition
offset by the advantages of seeing the separate strands of my inquiry woven
together in this one place. In any case, this account seeks to be simultaneously
capacious and supple: that is, it seeks concepts that can cumulatively provide
the explanatory power of a comprehensive theory even as they individually
offer the flexibility for a deep dive into the workings of particular uses of the
technique.
I start with general points: (1) Reliable and unreliable narration are nei-
ther binary opposites nor single phenomena but rather broad terms and con-
cepts that each cover a wide range of author-narrator-audience relationships
in narrative. Furthermore, it makes sense to combine their two ranges into a
single larger spectrum that runs from unreliable reporting on one end to mask
narration on the other (details about these subtypes to follow). (2) Unreli-
able narration and deficient narration, by contrast, are radically different rhe-- For an alternative comprehensive account, see Sternberg and Yacobi, who criticize
the rhetorical view on several points. Although I am not persuaded by their critique, I invite
readers to compare the two accounts and draw their own conclusions.
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