Unreliable Narrator

The concept of the unreliable narrator is among the most discussed in current narratology. From being considered a text-internal matter between the personified narrator and the implied author by Booth, or the implied reader by Chatman, cognitive and constructivist narrative theorists like A. Nünning have described it as a reader-dependent issue. The detection of a narrator's unreliability is an act of 'naturalization,' he claims, with reference to Culler.

In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Wayne Booth first proposed the critical concepts of the reliable and unreliable narrator. Booth suggested that the notion of reliability was best defined in terms of its underlying relationship to the implied author. But this attempted linkage was never a truly secure one; and in the intervening years, a protracted debate has persisted regarding this central issue. This paper suggests that the key to resolving this debate is the formulation of a more secure definition of narrative reliability. The linguistic concept of markedness provides the critical means for doing this. Using the test case of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, five determinants of a reliable narrator in first-person fiction are suggested: a secure speaking-location back home; the use of the classical middle style of standard English; observer-narrator status; ethical maturity; and a plot structure which involves the retrospective re-evaluation or Aristotelian anagnorisis of a character other than the narrator. If this much is accepted, unreliable narration may be defined in terms of a range of departures from this basic model.

Defining the unreliable narrator started with Wayne Booth's coining the term and since then has been attempted by a number of other scholars. However, the heterogeneity of this category makes it difficult to determine. The present article attempts to examine the characteristics of three narrators deemed unreliable in most critical studies, Marlow from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kinbote from Nabokov's Pale Fire and Braithwaite from Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot. The novels examined present three different types of narratives -an adventure tale, a commentary on a poem, and a biography of a famous writer -all of which are supposed to be fairly objective accounts of past circumstances. The ways in which their narrators present them, however, turn these into multi-layered narratives with several competing storylines in each. Analyzing narrative devices, the article seeks to determine how we could recognize a potential unreliable narrator and what features of narration could serve as criteria for placing a character in this category. The first-person narration unavoidably carries a certain amount of unreliability owing to the subjective perspective of the narrators and their personal motives for storytelling. The narrators' ironic attitude in combination with humor invigorates their narratives, and since Marlow, Kinbote and Braithwaite are quite talented rhetoricians and appealing storytellers, their audiences follow them to the end of their inconclusive tales.

The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan's Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis.

Per Krogh Hansen brings attention to one of the most discussed narratological
concepts in recent years, the ‘unreliable narrator’. In the article
»The Dynamics of Unreliable Narration«, Hansen is considering to what
extent the question of authorial control or intention is relevant when
analysing and interpreting unreliable narrators. In the first part of the
article, he questions this claimed essentiality of an authorial agent from
three different angles: One concerning the border between diegetic and
extradiegetic issues. Another with specific focus on unreliable simultaneous
narration (first person, present tense). And a third with attention
paid to the role of unreliable narrators in factual narratives. In the article,
he proposes a model for describing the different dynamic roles the
authorial agent, as well as the empirical reader, plays in different forms
of unreliable narration. Here, terms like ‘implicit author’, ‘omitted author’,
‘double narratees’ and ‘constructive readers’ are introduced and
illustrated by examples of Dennis Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe.

The narratological concept of unreliable narration is subject to constant debate. While this debate affects different kinds of problems associated with unreliability, one of the central issues concerns the application area of ›unreliable narration‹. Here, theorists discuss, for example, whether there are certain types of narrators that cannot be unreliable, whether some kinds of narrators are necessarily unreliable, or in which way other characters apart from narrators can also be unreliable. It is the first one of these questions that I am addressing in this paper: Are there types of narrators that cannot be unreliable?

Les essais réunis dans ce volume interrogent aussi bien le temps des œuvres que le temps à l’œuvre, c’est-à-dire sa formulation narrative mais également son pouvoir d’érosion et de genèse qui affecte les hommes, les livres qu’ils écrivent ou qu’ils lisent et les genres littéraires qu’ils pratiquent. Si l’on veut explorer l’œuvre du temps, on ne peut s’en tenir à l’hypothèse que les intrigues se contentent de mettre en ordre l’histoire et de la doter d’un sens, il nous faut à l’inverse définir les fondements d’une poétique de la discordance narrative qui permette de suivre le glissement du sens dans le temps. Cette réflexion sur le temps soulève une question subsidiaire mais non moins essentielle : « D’où vient le récit et où va-t-il ? » Tenter de répondre à cette question exige de sortir de l’emprisonnement textualiste pour penser la manière dont la narration émerge de la vie et retourne à elle. Il s’agit aussi de marquer la différence qui existe entre les récits qui visent à clarifier le passé, ceux qui veulent en témoigner fidèlement, et ceux enfin qui mettent en scène des histoires inachevées, tournées vers un avenir à vivre ou à lire. Face à la crise que connaissent aujourd’hui les études littéraires et à l’inquiétude que génèrent les usages médiatiques, politiques ou économiques du storytelling, il s’agit de rappeler que la théorie narrative permet de reconnaître dans la littérature le plus fascinant des laboratoires du récit. Si l’homme n’est pas autre chose qu’un faisceau d’histoires, alors l’analyse narratologique des œuvres littéraires demeure la voie royale pour accéder à son humanité.

This article provides a summary of a book that lays the foundation for a stylistical and rhetorical approach of narratology whose aim is to describe with the greatest possible precision the mechanism of immersive and intriguing literary narratives. Noting the existence of a strong polysemy around the notion of plot, I propose to start with a functionalist definition capable to emphasize the close relationship between narrative dynamics and emplotment, which builds, maintain, and resolve tension in the aesthetic experience. I also mention how the characterization of characters and the mutability of their roles can determine in an essential way the profile of narrative tension.

Cet article propose une synthèse d'un ouvrage qui pose les fondements d'une approche narratologique d'orientation stylistique et rhétorique visant à décrire avec le plus de précision possible le mécanisme des récits littéraires immersifs et intrigants. Partant du constat de l'existence d'une forte polysémie autour de la notion d'intrigue, je proposerai de partir d'une définition fonctionnelle apte à souligner le rapport étroit entre la dynamique du récit et la mise en intrigue, qui noue, entretien et dénoue une tension dans l'expérience esthétique. J’évoquerai également la manière dont la caractérisation des personnages et la mutabilité de leurs rôles peuvent déterminer de manière essentielle le profil de la tension narrative.

Julian Barnes’ successful novel The Sense of an Ending has been generating diverse interpretations, as it is told by a completely unreliable narrator. As it is said in the first part of this article, though, the tendency of the critics so far has been that of trusting the narrator himself in the last confession he makes at the end of his recounting. On the contrary, in the second part of the present essay the author tries to give meaning to the reported story, not through what the narrator says, but through a few proofs scattered all over the novel which demonstrate that even the finale is in essence a lie or, at least, only a partial truth. This is probably because the narrator is being untruthful to himself as well, in order not to feel guilty for a misdeed he committed during his youth. In the last two parts, through references to several French thinkers, the author of the article demonstrates that the bone of contention, that is, what in the end the reader finds out to be the narrator's son, is a form of (in Derrida's terminology) différance, in other words an incomplete identity created by means of the narrator's identification.

The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contradiction in terms. The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a story would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling, a commitment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author's " norms of the work. " Nonetheless, in the essay that follows, three of Katherine Mansfield's short stories — " A Cup of Tea " (1922), " Bliss " (1918) and " Revelations " (1920) — will be examined in order to demonstrate how the strategic suppression of the distinction between the voice of the narrator and that of the central character can lead to a strong sense of unreliability. In order to read such narratives effectively, the reader must reappraise the value of certain other stylistic elements, including the use of directives involved with directly quoted speech, seemingly minor discrepancies between adjacent sentences and, perhaps most importantly, the structure of the fiction itself. We contend that Mansfield's use of this form of unreliable third-person fiction is her unique contribution to the short story genre.

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-) is one of the most influencing writers of post-world war era. His third novel The Remains of the Day (1989) is one of the best of his fictions written using his signature mnemo-technic. The novel went on to bag the Booker the following year. The narrator- protagonist Stevens is a butler by profession. With all his faults and blemishes he represents a unique human instinct- if not normal- of preferring to be rather to become, in a Nietzschean sense. Stevens has numerous flaws which holds on to the interest of the readers. He is addicted to believing and remaining the same- an image of his father. His memories and his style of recollection gives him away to the readers as one of the most intriguing of the unreliable narrators ever created. The character of Stevens is more of a warning than a study. The author warns us of the extremities or absolutisms. Indeed too much of anything- even an idea- is simply wrong.

Michel Houellebecq est un auteur controversé, non seulement parce que certains critiques s’interrogent sur le statut littéraire de son oeuvre, qui a connu un immense succès commercial, mais aussi parce que ses romans, souvent provocateurs, engendrent chez les lecteurs des réactions contrastées, qui vont du rejet radical, accompagné par une mise en cause de la valeur morale du texte, à une forte adhésion, généralement fondée sur le constat de la lucidité de l’auteur et de sa capacité à représenter le monde tel qu’il est, avec férocité, sans complaisance, mais également avec courage et un certain humour. Au coeur de ces jugements qui engagent des valeurs essentielles pour la littérature, se pose la question fondamentale de la polyphonie romanesque. Sur la base d’une analyse de quelques extraits tirés des Particules élémentaires, seront dégagés différents facteurs, textuels et contextuels, susceptibles de conditionner la réception du texte, notamment la perception de la « voix » de l’auteur, tout en offrant un espace ouvert sur une pluralité interprétative. Je me centrerai en particulier sur la manière dont le roman présente des opinions racistes, homophobes et antiféministes susceptibles d’engendrer de violentes réactions de la part du public, tout en engageant, à des degrés différents, la responsabilité morale de l’écrivain. Cette analyse visera également, en préambule, à réfléchir sur le statut éthique des énoncés fictionnels.

Unreliability of the narrator is quite often the issue one has to settle to be able to assess the invented world. Yet, to solve the problem of whether the narrator is reliable, one needs to understand his motives for (not) telling the truth, which significantly delays the process and introduces further problems of interpretation. In this puzzling task, the reader should be aided by the subtleties of the narrator’s tone: a mocking, self-congratulatory intonation suggests a peculiar kind of deviousness; a naïve, childish voice – a certain kind of innocence; unstable, delusional tone indicates possible mental problems and methodical mythmaking betrays personality issues requiring a more focused observation. But what if the voice keeps changing, easily passing from a didactic omniscience to self-obsessed fussiness and then again to philosophical detachment, only to end up in the drawl of profound boredom? What if the narrator refuses to use words to communicate and invents pictures which are then described and understood as the true story, hidden within the husk of language which conceals the image? The paper analyzes some of the issues of unreliability in connection with the use of visual stimuli in Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight.

L’objet de l’article est de définir ce que pourrait être une « critique polyphonique », qui s’attacherait, non pas à trancher la question de savoir qui parle dans un texte, mais à « faire l’inventaire » des voix qui peuvent se faire entendre dans un énoncé fictionnel en montrant que c’est la manière dont les interprètes rattachent les énoncés à des voix spécifiques et relient ces voix entre elles qui détermine pour eux les valeurs éthiques, aléthiques et esthétiques de l’œuvre.

Peut-être l'idée même de narration (distincte de l'enchantement, de la conjuration ou de l'invocation) est-elle née pour la première fois, dans une société de chasseurs, de l'expérience du déchiffrement des traces. […] Le chasseur aurait été le premier à « raconter une histoire » parce qu'il était le seul capable de lire une série cohérente d'événements dans les traces muettes (sinon imperceptibles) laissées par sa proie 1. Protéger ou s'adapter à un écosystème (prologue) Il y a des situations de prolifération ou de raréfaction des espèces qui conduisent assez naturellement les humains à adopter des attitudes agressives ou protectrices, notre mission semblant être de protéger un équilibre perpétuellement menacé de dissolution. Lorsque les loups foisonnaient dans les forêts et massacraient nos troupeaux, nous avons cherché à les exterminer, mais lorsqu'ils ont fini par disparaître presque entièrement de la planète, nous avons soudain ressenti le besoin de les protéger. L'être diabolisé par les bestiaires a fini par incarner un monde sauvage dont nos sociétés industrielles nous ont donné la nostalgie. Cette attitude, somme toute légitime, vise à préserver un écosystème dont dépend notre survie. Nous espérons que l'univers restera immuable et que le changement se limitera à un jeu constant de rééquilibrages dynamiques, nous préservant d'une évolution plus radicale dont les conséquences seraient imprévisibles. Il en va de la fiction littéraire comme du loup, accusée de tous les mots lorsqu'elle dominait l'horizon culturel d'un siècle papivore 2 , on lui reconnaît aujourd'hui, alors qu'elle semble menacée d'extinction, des vertus irremplaçables : elle améliorerait la littératie d'une génération vouée à l'image, favoriserait la compréhension de la complexité du monde, permettrait le développement d'une théorie de l'esprit et d'un sens moral. Pourtant, malgré ce retour en grâce, la plupart des défenseurs des belles-lettres considèrent qu'à l'inverse, le storytelling serait une espèce invasive dont il conviendrait de limiter la prolifération, car cette forme de communication saperait les fondements de notre démocratie et nous soumettrait à un pouvoir manipulateur. Dans les deux cas, il en va de la survie de quelques uns d'entre nous dans l'écosystème académique et dans l'économie de la culture. Mais quelle est notre véritable influence face à ces transformations de notre environnement culturel ? Avons-nous vraiment le pouvoir de réinsuffler la passion de la littérature parmi nos contemporains et de les détourner de ces histoires qui formatent les esprits et qui les aliènent dans un monde de faux-semblants ? Nous sentons que l'évolution est profonde et que notre pouvoir est limité ; nous avons beau crier au loup, il semble que nous soyons condamnés à demeurer des Cassandres impuissantes. Par ailleurs, ce réflexe, qui nous pousse à célébrer les

Flashback and flashforward, as well as analepsis and prolepsis in the terminology of Gérard Genette, belong to some of the few almost undisputed concepts in narrative theory. But if we dig deeper into their original definitions, we come to re- alize that they appear either vague or as an oversimplification of a more complex issue. In order to add precision to narrative theory’s efforts to analyze time shifts, I propose a distinction between dramatized analepsis, which is synonymous with flashback, and undramatized analepsis, which is not. Dramatized analepsis and flashback are syn- onyms because each involves an enactment of the past, while undramatized analepsis refers to past events but does not involve a real shift from one space-time to another. After looking at how this distinction can illuminate some paradigmatic cases in film and graphic narrative, I consider how these distinctions apply to verbal narratives. In addition, I discuss “fading effects” in verbal narratives, effects that follow from the pro- gressive transition from one space-time to another. Finally, I suggest how these tools can illuminate the handling of temporality in Guy de Maupassant’s The Signal. More generally, this essay contributes to narratological understanding of the intersequential organization of narratives by adding greater precision to Genette’s discussion of ana- lepsis by means of the distinction between dramatized and undramatized analepsis. Methodologically, the essay shows the value of transmedial comparisons, since my case about verbal narrative follows from work on narrative in visual media.

La fiction peut-elle mentir occasionnellement ou est-elle
d'emblée un mensonge? Aborder cette question pose des problèmes complexes, car nous nous situons devant un abîme creusé par le statut illocutif propre aux énoncés fictionnels. Cet article examine deux nouvelles de Borges (La Forme de l'épée, Le Livre de sable) pour définir les conditions du "bluff" fictionnel et de l'éventuelle "vérité" que peut transmettre un récit de fiction.

Drawing from recent studies on authorial attachment by Dawson (2013) and Korthals Altes (2014), the article revises the notions of narrative authority and gnomic statements. I claim that authorial concerns, instead of manifesting themselves in imposing intrusions, may take the form of agential indecision, reflecting the ultimate imbalance between lived experience and its artistic framing. As a narrative emblem of this relativist stance toward knowledge and authority, I deal with focalizers who assume authorial postures in their present-tense internal discourse and by doing so juxtapose existentialist immediacy of experience with artistic maneuvering. The ultimate locus for authorial ethos without authoritativeness is found in the gnomic statement that is framed by free indirect discourse and ambivalent pronominal reference. My main test case is Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall (2010), but I also discuss its intertextual networking with Madame Bovary, Death in Venice, and Disgrace. In its keen attention to gnomic statements, Cohn's canonical analysis of Death in Venice serves as a methodological inspiration. I suggest that By Nightfall offers an unconven-tional reading of Mann's novella by drawing an analogy between the protagonists of these two novels: the self-deprecation and aesthetic perfectionism of Cunningham's protagonist preoccupies the very narrative discourse that nevertheless refers to him in the third-person, suggesting that also Aschenbach may have more narrative control over his downfall than Cohn is ready to allow him. My cross-fertilizing analyses, moving between canonized readings and contemporary examples, demonstrate a relativist stance toward gnomic truths, a stance finding its expression in the narrative double exposure of the figural and the authorial.

The notion of unreliability entails the reader’s perception of a split between two communicative levels: one that includes the narrator, who communicates directly with his/her addressee, and one that includes the author, who communicates indirectly with the reader, sending him/her messages that differ from those the narrator seems to be responsible for. In most cases of assessing the tensions or discrepancies between these communicative levels, the critics’ main interest lies in epistemological and ethical issues; this essay, however, focuses on the compositional level, an aspect much less often dealt with in this context. I believe The Good Soldier constitutes a particularly powerful instance of what may be termed ‘compositional unreliability’: the narrative is told by an ‘amateurish’ narrator in a seemingly rambling, associative, and unorderly manner, while at the same time the text is perceived by the reader as highly planned, structured, and organized. The positing of Dowell as a compositionally unreliable narrator is integral to Ford’s modernist-impressionist poetics, helping him achieve two of his major aesthetic goals: a strong mimetic illusion and progression d’effet.

The ‘curse of knowledge’ is a pervasive cognitive bias that makes it very difficult
for us accurately to imagine, once we know something, what it is like not to know it. This article analyzes examples drawn from both novels and films to demonstrate that this bias plays a substantial and previously unexamined role in narrative structure.
I argue that narratives often take advantage of the curse of knowledge to solve an ongoing storytelling dilemma: how to engineer satisfying twists that genuinely surprise audiences but also avoid coming off as non-sequiturs or cheats. The curse of knowledge provides a useful mechanism to encourage readers to over-generalize propositions in predictable and reproducible ways, while making it likely that they will also agree, in retrospect, that these generalizations were mistaken. The same bias serves to enhance the impression, in hindsight, that the narrative’s outcome was indeed possible to predict.

To enable a clear and detailed description of narrative features, narratological concepts should be well-defined and unambiguous. My paper aims to contribute to this by analyzing, reworking, and relabeling two models of ›unreliable interpreting‹. I show how these two models developed by Phelan/Martin and Margolin are based on relevant intuitions yet have problematic aspects. Building upon these approaches, it is reasonable to integrate two concepts into our theory of unreliable narration: that of ›unreliable belief‹, which, like unreliable reporting, concerns the realm of facts but affects the narrator's cognition instead of his utterances, and that of ›inference-related unreliability‹, which is concerned with the validity of the narrator's reasoning on both the utterance and cognitive level. By integrating these two concepts, this approach makes the theory of unreliability more robust and helps provide better answers to common questions in the field of unreliable narration.

The article emphasizes some of the hitherto under-explored aspects of the The Plague that constitute the novel's complex system of ethical and aesthetic convictions and contradictions. I attempt to expand on the critical discussion of the fictional narrative, dealing the thematization of narrative reliability and its infractions, and complement this with an analysis of the novel's aesthetic principles – juxtaposing a literary-critical discussion with the description of a literary-historical process. Enlisting evidence from Camus's published notebooks, the analysis aims to show how the rendering of the ethical issues of this narrative is facilitated by its formal and aesthetic features. The “amateur” narrator's self-proclaimed narrative ethics includes a claim to artlessness, yet the infractions, along with the various narrative stances – collective, extended, and self-concealing – subvert this claim. Analysis of the thematization of “narrative reserve” in the novel shows how the form and the issues raised are fused in the novel's characters while leaving the readers the freedom to take their own stand. The suggestion is made that the final incorporation of narrative reserve itself reflects the kind of moral development dramatized in the novel.

This paper discusses a passage from the finale of Heliodorus' Aethiopica which has hitherto been interpreted as suggesting that Charicles, the heroine's foster-father, possesses information which he should not hold according to earlier parts of the novel. Offering two solutions to the Charicles puzzle, this article sheds light on important narratological characteristics of Heliodorus' novel: firstly, the Aethiopica opens itself to a 'completive mode of reading', which prompts the reader to speculate about unnarrated parts of the story; secondly, profound ambiguities can trigger chain reactions of alternative readings which reach far into parts of the plot that are connected with the ambiguous segment.

Stories recounted by mentally ill narrators have long been considered prime examples of unreliable narration. Yet in the light of the “cognitive turn” in literary studies, recent theories on unreliable narrators extend beyond text-immanent models to include the reader’s perception of the narrator. In this respect, assumptions about normalcy are particularly relevant. It is my aim to analyse the obsessive-compulsive narrator Daniel in Steve Martin’s humorous novel The Pleasure of My Company (2003), who aims at reconstructing the definition of normalcy. I want to show how the motif of “acting vs. being,” which permeates the novel, serves as the narrator’s means to control the reader’s perception in an attempt to present himself as “normal,” i.e. “likeable.” Yet my analysis reveals that the characters’ and the reader’s normative notions about health eventually dominate, undermine the narrator’s strategy and drive the plot to a deus-ex-machina ending that fully reestablishes conventional normalcy.

The theme of the double has been recurrent in the history of literature. In “Experiment” (1995), Julian Barnes adapts this myth to Postmodernism: multiplicity of voices, reflection on the identity, rewriting of (hi)story, scepticism, irony, experimentation and a need of active readership. Indeed, active readership will be required to see the double but also to dismantle it. For this purpose, this paper analyses the characters of this short story and categorises them following the hypothesis of the neurologist Antonio R. Damasio concerning the construction of the self. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct this short story in order to see how Barnes has been able to create the paradox of a double with only one body and one self.

Öz Anlatıcılık ve anlatmalar geçmişten günümüze toplumların hayatında adları, icra özellikleri, metinleri ve rolleri aynı kalarak veya değişerek gelmiştir. Zamanla anlatıcı tiplerinde gelişmeler, değişmeler ve güncellenmeler meydana gelmiştir. Türk kültüründe kam/şamanlardan başlayarak destancılar, masal anlatıcıları, meddahlar ve âşıklar olmak üzere çeşitli anlatıcı tipleri var olmuştur. Günümüzde ise gelişen teknoloji ve oyun kavramıyla anlatıcı tiplerine yenileri eklenmiştir. "Rol Yapma Oyunları" olarak adlandırılan oyunlar bir anlatım icrası, bu oyunların bir nevi hakemi olan oyun yöneticileri de bir anlatıcı tipi olarak değerlendirilebilir. Bu düşünceden hareketle bu makalede "Rol Yapma Oyunları"nın oyun yöneticileri anlatıcılık yönünden incelenecektir. İlk olarak kam/şaman, destancı, masal anlatıcısı, meddah ve âşık gibi geleneksel anlatıcı tiplerine değinilecek, ardından rol yapma oyunları hakkında kısa bilgi verilecektir. Daha sonra çeşitli oyun yöneticilerinden derleme çalışmasıyla elde edilen verilerden hareketle rol yapma oyunlarındaki oyun yöneticilerinin ve bu oyunların yaratım/aktarım/icra, şekil/yapı, içerik/konu ile işlev özelliklerine değinilecek. Sonuç olarak da oyun yöneticilerinin anlatıcılık nitelikleri ortaya konulacaktır. Abstract Narrations and recitals have come from the past to the present day in the lives of societies, their names, executive characteristics, texts and roles remain the same or changed. In time, developments, changes and updates occurred in the narrator types. In Turkish culture, there were various types of narrators such as saga-tellers, storytellers, meddah and minstrels and especially kam/shamans. Nowadays, new ones has been added to the narrator types with the developing technology and game concept. Games called Role Playing Games can be considered as a narrative type, and game masters who are sort of arbitrators of these games can be considered as a narrator type. In this article, the game masters of Role Playing Games al will be examined in terms of narrator. First of all, traditional narrator types such as kam/shaman, saga-teller, storyteller, meddah and minstrel will be mentioned and then short information about role-playing games will be given. Then, the data obtained from the compilation study of various game masters will * Öğr. Gör., Ege Üniversitesi Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Enstitüsü,

The hero and narrator of Nabokov’s novel Despair, Hermann Karlovich, has been long considered insane. Almost all critical work on the novel  is hinged on the assumption of its narrator’s fundamental unreliability. Indeed, Hermann exhibits a variety of symptoms of clearly psychotic nature: delusions, conceptual disorganization, hyperactivity, grandiosity, emotional withdrawal, anxiety, depression, disorientation…  The very plot of the novel, of a murder for the purpose of insurance swindling, based on the narrator’s false assumption of possessing a double, seems to indicate a fundamental flaw in Hermann’s mental abilities. Yet, most commentators also agree that Hermann is not only mad, but also scheming. Such mixture makes him into a morbidly fascinating and ingeniously sly narrator, who for unclear purposes imposes a torturously circular story on his readers. This paper proposes a closer look at Hermann’s numerous symptoms, attempting to assess his unreliability by taking into account his possible motives for writing the narrative.  At the moment when Hermann begins his project of writing, he knows that his plot has been overturned, and that the police has identified him as the prime suspect. If he is writing in anticipation of an arrest, the purpose of the narrative may be to prepare himself for the trial. The question that needs to be asked is, whether or not Hermann is capable of simulating his insanity by purposefully manipulating the narrative in order to evade the likely death sentence. Paradoxically, the malingered madness would not remove, but increase the unreliability of the text. At the same time, it would cause some interesting shifts in the story, as some of the key episodes would need to be reconsidered and rearranged.

Maj outlines the main concepts of post-classical (cognitive and trans-medial) narrative theory (especially storyworld) in order to reintegrate the category of fiction and the fictional world into video game research. This integration of questions of mimeticism, representation (and its realism) or the intensity of the reception goes hand in hand with a discussion on Lisbeth Klastrup’s notion of ‘a world’s worldness’ as well as the history of theoretical and narratological concepts of perceiving the world, world-building and inhabiting fictional worlds. In the final part Maj draws on Tadeusz Sławek’s oikological reflections to explore the increasingly frequent occurrence of houses and the inhabitation of virtual space in world-building video games – a phenomenon that suggests that a literary theory offers an apt perspective to tackle the most recent problems in games studies.

As the result of Morrison’s efforts to write a novel which incarnates the spirit of the jazz, the most discernible feature of her Jazz (1992) is its linguistic and structural similarity to jazz music. She has tried to blur the distinctions between literature and music, the printed and the heard, the visual and the aural by drawing on various jazz techniques. To create a musical language, she recounts her narrative via alliterated sentences whose inherent rhythm induces a kind of music in the text. She has also structured her novel upon the composing mode of the jazz that is based on the spontaneity and improvisation of musicians who execute the double role of composer/performer, and whose personality contributes to their composition. As the melody of jazz is gradually “unraveled” by performers, each of Morrison’s characters plays their own pieces in relating the story, and divergent narrative viewpoints are mingled to resonate the diversity of melodies produced by jazz musicians in a single musical piece. Moreover to echo the rebellious spirit of the Jazz Age and to resound her work like an improvised performance, Morrison undermines the tacit rules concerning the alleged power of narrators by presenting a fallible narrator. Likewise the jazz that engages the personality of its performers, the main narrator of Jazz is deeply involved in and simultaneously detached from the world of the characters, hence she makes mistakes in presenting them and predicting their future lives, and candidly confesses her blunders.

1 Introduction
2 Interpreting Thucydides
3 Narratology, historiography and interdisciplinarity
4 Shifting responsibility for Amphipolis
4.1 Narratological apparatus
4.2 Plot and temporal relation
4.3 Focalisation
4.4 Characterisation
5 Linguistic-narratological analysis
6 Shifting responsibility for Brasidas’ victories
6.1 Brasidas captures Megara
6.2 The ‘Acanthian Tryptic’
7 Conclusion

Narrative Faith engages with the dynamics of doubt and faith to consider how literary works with complex structures explore different moral visions. The study describes a literary petite histoire that problematizes faith in two ways—both in the themes presented in the story and the strategies used to tell that story—leading readers to doubt the narrators and their narratives. Starting with Dostoevsky's "Demons" (1872), a literary work that has captivated and confounded critics and readers for well over a century, the study examines Albert Camus's "The Plague" (1947) and Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Penitent" (1973/1983), works by twentieth-century authors who similarly intensify questions of faith through narrators that generate doubt. The two postwar novelists share parallel preoccupations with Dostoevsky's art and similar personal philosophies, while their works constitute two literary responses to the cataclysm of the Second World War—extending questions of faith into the current era. The book's last section looks beyond narrative inquiry to consider themes of confession and revision that appear in all three novels and open onto horizons beyond faith and doubt—to hope.