Having finished reading Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the reader is left wondering if any of the narrated facts were actually real. The unreliability of the narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher” However, since the readers’ world-models and the conceptual premises can differ quite fundamentally, the narrator can be unreliable in the opinion of one reader of the text whereas another one is convinced that the narrator is completely reliable. By relating inconsistencies to frames of reference and to certain functions the reader “naturalizes” a text and constructs meaning. For instance, a frame of reference might consist of literary reading experience or merely life experience. If there is a discrepancy, the reader relates the text to his world-knowledge and textual inconsistencies can be connected to various frames of references so that the inconsistencies fulfil a certain function. Whether a narrator is unreliable or not then depends on whether there is a discrepancy between the reader’s world-model, also including norms and values, and the narrator’s world view. Nünning claims that the unreliable narrator cannot be defined by means of the textbase only, but that extratextual information has to be taken into account as well, meaning that the conceptual premises or the world-model that a reader applies to a text have to be included. Taking works of other narratologists into account, he has developed a more recent concept of the unreliable narrator relating it to cognitive linguistics and the frame theory. On account of that, I will confine myself to Ansgar Nünning’s approach. Many narratologists have tried to find a valid definition and have often been contradicted by their colleagues. This, however, has proven to be a wrong assumption. What is unreliable narration?Īt first glance, the phenomenon of unreliable narration appears relatively easy to define. However, prior to dealing with this question a definition of unreliable narration will be given and the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” will be examined concerning his reliability. In order to further examine this thesis “The Fall of the House of Usher”, one of his most widely known short stories, will be looked at in the following with regard to the question whether the terror is caused by the unreliability of the narrator or whether there are other reasons mainly responsible for it. However, are those to be considered the prime reasons for the terror in Poe’s fiction? There are other factors which are not as easily detected but which might still be the chief reasons and can be related to the above mentioned ones, such as the unreliability of the narrator. These are undoubtedly factors that contribute to the terror created in his works. Moreover, in Poe’s fiction it is often the case that “the boundaries between reality, illusion and madness remain unresolved”. His tales are known for dark settings and characters with diseased or deluded minds. Is the terror caused by the unreliability of the narrator?Įdgar Allen Poe is certainly one of the most famous writers of Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century. The unreliability of the narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher”ģ.
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