The aim of this bachelor’s thesis is to discuss, and attempt to confirm, that Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) lacks closure. Since the novel has an unreliable narrator who offers her readers several credible endings to her narrative, and who also acts as the fictitious author of the story, unreliability and metafiction are claimed to be the main underlying causes of this deprivation of closure. The discussion in the first section of the analysis is based on the plot development depicted in Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, and the second part is focused on Victoria Orlowski’s four metafictional characteristics denoting ways in which writers of metafiction transgress narrative levels. The claim is concluded to be partly fulfilled, since Atonement is regarded as lacking closure in terms of narrative structure but not in a philosophical and moral sense.

This thesis explores the genre of gothic literature by outlining the themes and common techniques that writers use. It discusses prominent writers in the genre, as well as critiques their techniques and compares them to my own. Two fiction pieces are accompanied with the critical introduction that fit the gothic literature genre.

Collection of short stories about unreliable characters. Iris, Happy New Year, Promise, and Siblings are stories about home - whether it is about a broken home or just a character missing home. These short stories are all fictional.

This essay focuses on the character Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and his unreliability as a narrator and compares it to the unreliable narration of the character Dexter Morgan in Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay. These characters' respective unreliability is analyzed from the perspective of six types of unreliability suggested by James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin: misreporting, misreading, misregarding, underreporting, underreading and underregarding. The result of the analysis is that while Patrick shows proof of being an unreliable narrator with respect to each one of the six types except underreporting and underregarding, Dexter can be connected to three of them (misreading, underreading and underregarding). Even if this might seem like an insignificant difference, the amount and the clarity in the examples of unreliability adhering to Patrick suggests that he is a much more unreliable narrator than Dexter is. This result indicates that characters can be at opposing ends of a spectrum of unreliability, on which Patrick according to this analysis is placed at the highly unreliable end of the spectrum and Dexter somewhere at the low end. / Denna uppsats fokuserar på karaktären Patrick Bateman i American Psycho skriven av Bret Easton Ellis, med tanke på denna karaktärs opålitlighet som berättare. Detta jämförs med karaktären Dexter Morgan från Darkly Dreaming Dexter skriven av Jeff Lindsay och denna karaktärs opålitlighet som berättare. Detta opålitliga berättande analyseras utifrån en modell som består av sex kategorier vilka James Phelan och Mary Patricia Martin har formulerat. Dessa kategorier kallas: ”misreporting”, ”misreading”, ”misregarding”, ”underreporting”, ”underreading” och ”underregarding”. Resultatet av analysen visar på att Patricks berättande kan placeras in i fyra av dessa kategorier (”misreporting”, ”misreading”, ”misregarding” och ”underreading”). Detta i jämförelse med Dexters berättande som kan placeras in i tre av dem (”misreading”, ”underreading” och ”underregarding”). Även fast denna skillnad kan verka obetydlig är det ändå så att de exampel på opålitlighet som Patrick visar upp står att finna i fler och tydligare exempel än hos Dexter vilket innebär att Patrick kan ses som en mer opålitlig berättare än Dexter. Resultatet av analysen indikerar att olika karaktärers berättande kan återfinnas i olika ändar av ett opålitlighetsspektrum. På detta spektrum kan Patrick då placeras in som en mer opålitlig berättare än Dexter som hamnar i den mer pålitliga delen av spektrumet.

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This essay investigates the narration in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by applying narratologist Great Olson’s model of unreliable narration to Jane, the novel’s narrator. Further, the novel discusses how Jane’s reliability affects the portrayal of the character Bertha Mason. The essay argues that the narrator’s characterization of Bertha Mason is deliberately misleading.

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The concept of the unreliable narrator has been studied in academic circles for the last fifty years. When an author decides to create unreliable narration, there is a reason for it. This essay compares the unreliability in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, using theories formulated by Tamar Yacobi, Bruno Zerweck, Therese Heyd, James Phelan and Amit Marcus. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the technique of other-deceptive narration is used by Christie. In Lolita the unreliability is complex. Using both other-deception and self-deception to create discrepancies between descriptions of the same event and phenomenon, Nabokov succeeds in creating an intricate unreliability. The effects of the unreliability in both novels, however, create an emotional bond between the reader and the narrator. The reader can be emotionally cathected to the narrator, even if the narrator is clearly a criminal.

Ghosts and Lovers is a collection of short stories told from the points-of-view of four related characters. Travis is a bisexual restaurant owner who fears commitment and longs for the idealistic version of love that he remembers from his past. Ezra, his boyfriend, is an artist struggling to accept the inherent imperfections of life. Travis's ex-girlfriend, Beth, attempts to come to terms with the life that she has chosen for herself. Her husband, Richard, deals with feelings of helplessness as he watches the events of his life unfold before him. By depicting the events of the story from multiple perspectives, the collection attempts to create a more objective view of reality than is ordinarily possible in fiction. An introductory preface examines the role of unreliable narrators and how reality is presented in fiction.

<p>The purpose of this essay is to explore how different means are used to create indeterminate meaning in Henry James’s novella<em> The Turn of the Screw</em>. It suggests that the indeterminacy creates gaps in the text which the reader is required to fill in during the reading process, and that this indeterminacy is achieved chiefly through the use of an unreliable narrator and of ambiguity in the way the narrator relates the events that take place. The reliability of the narrator is called into question by her personal qualities as well as by narrative factors. Personal qualities that undermine the narrator’s reliability are youth, inexperience, nervousness, excitability and vanity. Narrative factors that damage the narrator’s reliability concern the story as manuscript, the narrator’s role in the story she narrates, and her line of argumentation. The ambiguity in the way events are reported is produced by ambiguous words, dismissed propositions and omissions. The essay demonstrates how the unreliable narrator and the ambiguity combine to make the reader question the narrator’s account and supply his or her own interpretation of key elements in the story, that is, how they invite the reader to “co-author” the text.</p>