THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR IN SELECTED WORKS OF MODERN SPANISH FICTION

This study examines the technique of unreliability in narration in four novels: Pepita Jimenez, La incognita, La familia de Pascual Duarte and Muertes de perro. In its approach to the mechanism and effects of the technique of narrative unreliability, it recognizes that both the author-centered criticism, like that of Wayne Booth, and reader-oriented criticism, such as that offered by Wolfgang Iser, contribute significantly to an understanding of the workings of narrative irony. In its link between unreliable narrative and the first-person mode, it is supported by the critical ideas of Franz Stanzel.; Unreliable narration results from the establishing of a authorial viewpoint separate from that of a narrator, one from which the narrator's testimony may be found lacking. In a work in the unreliable mode, author and reader share a sense of irony regarding the weaknesses or inconsistencies of the narrator.; The mechanism and effects of narrative unreliability are analyzed in each of the four novels. The novels are then compared along two separate axes. One is the comparison and contrast of the use of the epistolary mode in Pepita Jimenez and La incognita and the use of the confessional/memoir format in La familia de Pascual Duarte and Muertes de perro. The limited vision provided by the epistolary mode is compensated for by use of an unlimited perspective in the omniscient narrative of the second half of Pepita Jimenez and in the dialogue sequel to La incognita, Realidad. The twentieth century novels capitalize upon a confessional or memoir format which allows for the creation of a narrator who look upon his actor-self of the past from a separate perspective. La familia de Pascual Duarte offers a single narrator who presents a dual nature. Muertes de perro capitalizes on a broadened temporal dimension in the use of two narrators whose situations and first-person narratives mirror upon one another.; A second point of comparison between the four novels is offered by the fact that Pepita Jimenez and La familia de Pascual Duarte employ central characters as narrators. La incognita and Muertes de perro offer peripheral ones. The varying ways in which novelists Valera and Cela employ one type of first-person narrator and Galdos and Ayala the other provides a basis for examining differing techniques of unreliability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.