Honors Program Theses

Award/Availability

Open Access Honors Program Thesis

First Advisor

Julie Husband

Abstract

Unreliable narrators can be found in every source of information. They mediate the text for the reader and raise our perceptions of stories, news articles, and forms of receiving facts. While they can be seen in a variety of different genres and forms of literature over the span of many decades, the understanding and acceptance of unreliable narrators have shifted over time. During the late nineteenth century, many authors utilized neutral narrators, intended to be without opinions or bias, when discussing social issues. In Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: a Girl of the Streets the narrator is not the main character Maggie, it is an omniscient narrator. The use of an omniscient narrator creates an all-knowing yet removed narrator, allowing social issues such as poverty and solitude to be told without emotional bias from Maggie, in an attempt to narrate the story as neutrally as possible. Similarly, Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel The Jungle tells a story of corruption within tenements and a factory town from an omniscient, third-person narrator. With the release of both of these stories, it was assumed that the narrators were neutral and speaking from an entirely factual perspective. When authors like Mark Twain used an unreliable narrator to explore social issues, as, for example, Twain does with Huck Finn in his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they drew attention to the presence and importance of point of view in these types of literature. The societal issues and solutions within the stories were created by authors with particular points of view, therefore a neutral narrator can rarely exist. The presence of unreliable narrators and the lack of neutrality is important to analyze because of how commonly used they are in literature, intentionally and unintentionally.

Year of Submission

2024

Department

Department of Languages and Literatures

University Honors Designation

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors

Date Original

5-2024

Object Description

1 PDF (28 pages)

Language

en

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