The immanent voice: an aspect of unreliable homodiegetic narration.
Abstract
Unreliable homodiegetic narration presents a unique mode
of narrative transmission which demands the encoding within
the text of 'translational indices', that is, signifiers of
several kinds which justify the reader/receiver in
over-riding the sincere first person avowals of the apparent
mediator of the discourse. The argument establishes the
presence of an epistemologically primary 'immanent'
narrative situation within an ostensibly unitary narrative
situation. Such a stereoscopic perspective upon the
presented world of the literary 'work provides the
reader/receiver with a warrant for a rejection of the
epistemological validity of the homodiegetic narrator's
discourse. Moreover, the thesis advances a typology of such
translational indices as they occur in the dense ontology of
the literary work of art. The narratological theory of
unreliable homodiegetic narration developed in the first
half of the dissertation is applied in the second half to
selected exemplars of such narrative transmissions,
demonstrating thereby the theoretical fecundity of the model
for the discipline of narratology.