Narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories The Pit and the Pendulum
With an unreliable narrator, the reader is welcome to become an active participant in the story helping to decipher its message, meaning, and course of events because the narrator is unable to do it (Monnet n.p.). At the same time, a reader who deems the narrator unreliable will question their actions and even the course of the story itself. Furthermore, a reader who perceived the narrator as a reliable speaker is more likely to take their statements and conclusions for granted without questioning them. It can happen that the same narrator would seem completely reliable to one reader and quite the opposite – to another. Practically, readers are the ones to determine how they feel about the narrator (Nünning 83-85). Most often, it is up to the reader to decide whether or not judgments and thought processes of a particular narrator can be trusted. The term “unreliable narrator” was first introduced by Wayne Booth who described the unreliability of a narrator as based on the differences between the views of the speaker in the story and the reader (Olson 93). In literature, narrators can be reliable or unreliable. Learn More Reliable and Unreliable Narrators
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