Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem

Abstract

There can be little doubt about the importance of the problem of reliability in narrative and in literature as a whole. It arises with respect to every speaking and reflecting participant in the literary act of communication, from the interlocutors in dialogue scenes to the overall narrator to the author himself; and its resolution determines not our view of the speaker alone but also of the reality evoked and the norms implied in and through his message. And the problem is (predictably) as complex and (unfortunately) as ill-defined as it is important. Are reliability and unreliability value-judgments or descriptions? Data or conjectures? Gradable or ungradable contrasts? Autonomous features or products of fixed combinations of other features? Such, in telegraphic style, are the cruxes that the theory of fiction for the most part either neglects or inadequately treats, for reasons that will emerge in due course. I would like to start by outlining what I believe to be the appropriate theoretical framework for the problem of reliability, and then to develop some of the implications that such placing has for the understanding and the analysis of this issue.