Resisting Naturalization of Normative Horizons
Emerging Vectors of Narratology (2017), 61-76
The term “unreliable” was introduced by Wayne Booth to describe narrators who, he claimed, speak or act in a way that is not “in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms).” Booth further described “unreliability” as a distance, but by discussing such distance as separating a work’s narrator from the thematic or authorial norms implied by that work, he isolated an integral element of a work’s literary dynamic—its problematized narrator—and normatively detached it from the rest of the work. . .
