| My dissertation demonstrates the existence of highly reliable narrators and examines their use in a number of supernatural narratives, including examples in shorter and longer fiction, radio, and film. My work analyzes the techniques of creating a highly reliable, homodiegetic narrator across a variety of narratives, and complicates current theories of narratorial reliability, which focus almost exclusively on questions of unreliability rather than degrees of reliability. Reliable homodiegetic narrators are viewed as essentially invisible to the narrative they are relating, as they do not add the multiplicity of interpretations that come with an unreliable narrator, but neither do they add to the story. Highly reliable narrators, however, do add to the narrative by limiting the possibilities of interpretation. The goal of this study is to identify primary characteristics of highly reliable narrators which are generally applicable across a wide variety of narrative media, and then to examine the distinctive traits that each medium imparts to the construction of such a narrator, providing literary critics and narrative theorists alike a new lens to use when examining a narrative. |
