To sum up, figure 12.1 is a diagram of the Spectrum of Reliable Narra-
tion. The direction of the arrow indicates the increasing degree of alignment
between author and narrator (the authorial audience is always aligned with
the author). Typically, reliable narration will have bonding effects.
UNRELIABLE NARRATION
Moving left from “restricted narration,” we enter into the territory of unreli-
able narration. I reiterate that in this territory, the narrating filter of the char-
acter’s mimetic function is always thick, because the unreliability is always
linked to specific traits of the character. In Living to Tell about It, I identify
six types of unreliability—misinterpreting and underinterpreting, misevalu-
ating and underevaluating, and misreporting and underreporting—but I do
not locate them along the spectrum of distance between author and narra-
tor. I now locate misinterpreting and underinterpreting closer to the middle,
misevaluating further along to the left, and misreporting at the far left end
of the spectrum. I place misreporting at the far left for two reasons: (1) Since
I view somebody-telling-somebody-else-that-something-happened as funda-
mental to narrative, I also view divergence between author and narrator about
what happened to be more fundamental than divergences in interpretations
or evaluations of what happened. (2) Misreporting is typically accompanied
by misinterpreting or misevaluating, and so in practice the distance between
author and narrator will be magnified. I locate misevaluating as further left
than misinterpreting because I view ethical deficiencies as more significant
than interpretive ones, and because I view misinterpreting as closer to what
happens in restricted narration.
234 • CHAPTER 1 2
FIGURE 12.1. The spectrum of reliable narration.