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The Reader as Co-Author : Uses of Indeterminacy in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-5211
Date January 2010
CreatorsPersson, David
PublisherKarlstads universitet, Estetisk-filosofiska fakulteten
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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