Salamanca Tree Hiddle narrates the entire story and frame-story, both of which are riddled with references to her mother-both of which, really, revolve around her mother-without once acknowledging that her mother has died. One work, which is not necessarily "experimental," but which nonetheless cannot be categorized in terms of Riggan's analysis of unreliable narrators, is Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons. Since Riggan's publication in 1981, literature has continued to defy categorization, and questions of narratorial and authorial "reliability" and "authenticity" have become far more nuanced than half a dozen categories could possibly cover. The archetypes Riggan lays out in his work tend to possess either a malicious or irreverent inten- but an intent, nonetheless-to deliberately mislead the reader, or they ascribe a naivety to the narrator that could be characterized as a shortcoming, for instance, a lack of experience or intelligence. In 1981, literary scholar William Riggan attempted to create explicit categories for unreliable narrators in his book, Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-person Narrator. James is credited as a major figure in the transition into modernism, and Booth, writing around the height of literary postmodernism, states in The Rhetoric of Fiction that "with the repudiation of omniscient narration, and in the face of inherent limitations in dramatized reliable narrators, it is hardly surprising that modern authors have experimented with unreliable narrators whose characteristics change in the course of the works they narrate" (156–157).īooth defines unreliable narrators in The Rhetoric of Fiction as narrators "whose values, on one or more axes, or whose pictures of the facts of the narrative explicitly depart from those of the implied author as teller" (431). Booth applies the term to several works in Henry James's oeuvre and analyzes the progression of James's experiments with different types of first-person narrators. Booth in his 1961 work, The Rhetoric of Fiction. The term "unreliable narrator" is thrown around as frequently and casually as terms like plot and tone in discussions of contemporary literature, so it may come as a surprise that it's a relatively new term.
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