Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [47]
8: The Figure of the Unreliable Narrator
tations based on the incoming information about the apparent trustworthiness of their sources. The interplay between the unpredictability on the one hand, and the unavoidable regularities of our information-processing cognitive systems, on the other, is what makes it possible for such writers as Cervantes, Lennox, Dostoyevski, and Nabokov to play with us in millions of ever new ways, degrees, and combinations, and it is what ensures that the game of fiction is still going strong after thousands of years.
SOURCE-MONITORING, ToM, AND THE FIGURE OF THE
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
I am pleased to report that there seems to be an affinity between my
JL take on an unreliable narrator as a function of textual experimentation with our source-monitoring and the view first introduced by Jonathan Culler and then explored by Monika Fludernik and Ansgar Nunning. As Nunning has argued recently, the critic may account
for whatever incongruousness s/he may have detected by reading the text as an instance of dramatic irony and by projecting an unreliable narrator as an integrative hermeneutic device. Culler . . . has clarified what is involved here: "At the moment when we propose that a text means something other than what it appears to say we introduce, as hermeneutic devices which are supposed to lead us to the truth of the text, models which are based on our expectations about the text and the world."1 . . . [Similarly, as] Fludernik has shown so convincingly [in a related context,] the projection of an unreliable narrator can be seen as "a result or effect of the reader's pragmatic interpretation of textual elements within their specific literary context."2
At the same time—although I agree with Nunning that we import the figure of an unreliable narrator because we need to frame in familiar social terms a perceived pattern of textual ambiguities—I am less troubled than he is by all the anthropomorphizing that goes into it. From the point of view of cognitive theory, it is not terribly surprising that we conjure up an extra mental presence when we intuit that the narrative is monkeying around with our source-monitoring capacities. There is a very short step— thanks to our Theory of Mind, which is ever hungry for more material to work on—from starting to suspect that the text is fooling us, to ascribing a whole host of other states of mind to that wily typographic entity. As Uri Margolin observes in a different context, " [S] ince we cannot but conceive of narrative agents as human or human-like, it is a basic cognitive requirement of ours that we attribute to them information-processing activities and internal knowledge representations."3
It is not accidental, then, that Phelan's recent exploration of unreliable narrators, Living to Tell about It, describes different types of fictional unreliability in terms of specific behavioral patterns on the part of the text as well as on the part of its readers. Phelan defines unreliable narration thus:
Narration in which the narrator's reporting, reading (or interpreting), and/or regarding (or evaluating) are not in accord with the implied author's. There are six main types of unreliable narration: misreporting, misreading, and misregarding, underreporting, underreading, and under-regarding. The two main groups can be differentiated by the activity they require on the part of the authorial audience: with the first group— misreporting, misreading, and misregarding—the audience must reject the narrator's words and reconstruct an alternative; with the second group—underreporting, underreading, and underregarding—the audience must supplement the narrator's view.4
Indeed, given what we know