Personal reliability of the narrator as a fundamental question of traditional narrative discourse from the point of view of psycholinguistics

• Main Author: E. E. Ivashkevych.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kamianets-Podilskyi National Ivan Ohiienko University, National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine, G.S.Kostiuk Institute of Psychology 2017-01-01
• Series: Проблеми сучасної психології
• Subjects: narrative discourse; visual emphasis; focalization of information; epigraphs’ emphasis; meta-narrative presentation of the text; contrasting visual linkings; actualization of narrative potential.
• Online Access: http://journals.uran.ua/index.php/2227-6246/article/view/156856/156199

In the article it was shown that the reliability of a narrator might be put to doubt in several ways, and the truthfulness of anyfictive narration as such had also been questioned. Unreliable narration is often linked with mental illness and instability, the voice of a broken mind. The so-called «mad» characters in literature have traditionally represented silenced views, they have been objects of ridicule or protagonists for cruel and unexplainable actions. However, this characterization of an insane literary narrator lacks much in definition, and instead one should focus on the question of how and with what kind of narrative structures mental instabilities are inscribed in fictive texts. It was proved that the rise of cognitive narratology had also greatly contributed to the study of the depiction of the human mind and human consciousness in literary works, providing the reader with an insight into the interaction with the literary text. As the examples of proving some details the author of the article used the novel «Watchmen» by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons. It was shown that the question of the reliable and unreliable narrator had been viewed in traditional narratology a case of «an ironic form», a conflict between the story and the narrative in which the story undermined the discourse. «Irony» as such is a tricky term as it firmly resists definition, and is not without difficulties. It was shown that the ironic form of writing established a secret communication between the implied author and the implied reader, which gave forth the unreliability of the narrator. Detecting irony requires an interpretative strategy that involves reading against the grain of the text and assuming that one grasps the unwritten message behind the literal one. So, analyzing «Watchmen» and describing psychological characteristics of narrative level of graphic novels the author of the article proposed such psycholinguistic aspects of narrative discourse: visual emphasis; focalization of information; epigraphs’ emphasis; meta-narrative presentation of the text; contrasting visual linkings; actualization of narrative potential