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.

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>

The purpose of this essay is to explore how different means are used to create indeterminate meaning in Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. 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.

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.

Annihilation is the first novel in the trilogy named “The Southern Reach,” a ScienceFiction/Horror series of books written by Jeff VanderMeer. Annihilation focuses on a team of scientists on an expedition into an area where the very nature has been altered in mysterious ways. The scientists’ goal is to study this area to come to an understanding of what is happening, but like the eleven previous expeditions, they fail.   With the aid of narratology, I will argue that Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation is an unreliable narrative. To prove that, I will analyse and discuss specific passage’s unreliable narration used in the novel, as well as incorporating themes from the novel that directly correlate with the unreliability of the novel’s narrative.  Annihilation is filled with ambiguous language and events that are on almost every  level unexplainable using scientific methods. The way that the novel is written makes the narrator, the biologist, unreliable in her narration of the events that take place around her. She is tormented by both her past and by the beings that inhabit Area X, such as the Crawler. The results of this study exemplify the ambiguity of VanderMeer’s writing and how he uses this ambiguous language to further thrust the narrative into a void of chaotic unreliability. There is nothing in the novel that can be trusted as fact in the context of the world in which the characters inhabit, down to the characters own thoughts and memories. The presented themes of Annihilation are in direct correlation with the unreliability of the narrative and show how deep VanderMeer went into constructing the most unreliable narrative possible.

(in English): The focus of this diploma thesis is disillusion in the works of the contemporary novelist Ian McEwan, particularly in his twenty-first century novels. The thesis analyses the disillusionment of the reader based on McEwan's work with traditional narratives and the reader's expectations, which is achieved through the employment of the unreliable narrator in Atonement (2001) and Sweet Tooth (2012), depiction of self-deception in Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010), and the misunderstanding on the interpersonal and intrapersonal level in On Chesil Beach (2007) and The Children Act (2014). The analysis uses the method of close reading and critical evaluation through the hermeneutic process in combination with Iser's theory about the reader, Foucault's definition of discourse and some generally accepted ideas based on psychology. The analysis reveals that Ian McEwan uses disillusion in his novels as a device through which he tries to encourage the reader to critically evaluate the reader's preconceptions about the world, the conventional narratives, and the roles the reader ascribes to him/herself and to the society around him/herself. By allowing the reader to build his/her expectations of the story's denouement and then crushing them, McEwan points out the reader's routine regarding a given...