torical phenomena, and deficient narration needs its own separate spectrum.
Although both unreliable and deficient narration are what I have called “off-
kilter”—that is, they both disrupt the alignment of authors, narrators, and
audiences that characterizes most reliable narration—they have one funda-
mental difference: unreliable narration is deliberately off-kilter, while deficient
narration is inadvertently off-kilter. In unreliable narration, author, authorial
audience, and actual audience align as they recognize what is off-kilter about
the narrator. In deficient narration, author, narrator, and authorial audience
align, but the actual audience views all of them as off-kilter.
For purposes of expositional clarity, I offer two taxonomies and illustrate
them by placing subtypes of reliable and unreliable narration along one spec-
trum and subtypes of deficient narration along another. At the same time,
I want to emphasize that these taxonomies are not procrustean categories
but rather heuristic devices designed to help explain the effects of different
kinds of character narration on author-narrator-audience relationships. The
application of the concepts to any one passage of character narration should
proceed in a posteriori rather than an a priori fashion—from effects back
to causes in the author-narrator-audience relationships, not from taxonomi-
cal categories to an account of effects. The distinction between bonding and
estranging unreliability is another reminder of the need for a posteriori appli-
cation: the distinction arises from the recognition that the same type of unre-
liability can have markedly different effects.
RELIABLE NARRATION
In Living to Tell about It, I argue that character narration is an art of indirec-
tion, in which an implied author uses a single text to address at least two dif-
ferent audiences (her own and the character narrator’s narratee) to accomplish
at least two different purposes (her own and the character narrator’s). In Liv-
ing to Tell, I also note that the main functions of narrators are to report, to
interpret, and to evaluate, and that skillful implied authors can communicate
to their audiences whether their purposes and those of their narrators con-
verge, diverge, or do some of each.
The essence of reliable narration is the implied author’s communicating
matters that she endorses through the filter of an ontologically distinct char-
acter. Authors adopt such filters because anchoring the reporting, interpret-
ing, and evaluating in the perspective and experiences of an actor and teller in
the storyworld can increase the thematic, affective, and ethical force and sig-
nificance of the whole narrative. But not all reliable narration establishes the
RELIABLE, UNRELIABLE, AND DEFICIENT NARRATION • 231