Content area
Full text
This essay brings together in one short space the rhetorical view of reliable, unreliable, and deficient character narration in both fiction and nonfiction that I began to develop in Living to Tell about It (2005) and have elaborated in my most recent book Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017).1 For the sake of efficiency and clarity, I will present this view via two taxonomies, but I want to emphasize that they are not ends in themselves but my means of accounting for a fascinating and challenging set of rhetorical dynamics: the multiple relations among authors, character narrators, and audiences across fictional and nonfictional narratives-and the various effects these relations generate. In addition, the larger account seeks to be simultaneously capacious and supple; that is, it seeks concepts that can cumulatively provide the explanatory power of a comprehensive model even as those concepts individually offer the flexibility for a deep dive into the workings of particular uses of the technique. I start with two sets of general points, the first about principles of rhetorical theory germane to this account of character narration, and the second about the account itself.2
Principles of Rhetorical Theory
1. Rhetorical theory subsumes the traditional view of narrative as a structured sign system representing a linked sequence of events under the broader view that narrative is itself an event-more specifically, a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience. The concern with purpose informs the analysis of narrative phenomena, including character narration: how has the teller tried to shape these materials in the service of her larger ends? The focus on narrative as multileveled communication follows from rhetorical theory's interest in accounting for the reading experience (and see principle #5 for a gloss on "experience"). Consequently, rhetorical theory is at least as interested in a narrative's affective, ethical, and aesthetic effects-and in their interactions-as it is in that narrative's thematic meanings. Affective effects include the range of emotional responses (from empathy to antipathy) to characters, narrators, and even authors and to the narrative as a whole. Affective effects can follow from and/or influence ethical effects, and the quality of an audience's affective and ethical engagements with a narrative greatly influences its aesthetic effects.
2. The rhetorical definition of narrative, "somebody telling somebody...