The Unreliable Narrator in Agatha Christie's the Murder of Roger Ackroyd
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The drawing of narrative inferences by the reader is very important to interpret the work well. However, the author, while writing a story, can treat some incidents in detail and barely mention or even omit others. He may distort these incidents, may not observe chronological sequence, he can use messengers or flashbacks, and so on and so forth. The function of resorting to these varied narrative techniques is to emphasize or de-emphasize certain story-events, to interpret some and to leave others to inference, to show or to tell, to comment or to remain silent, to focus on this or that aspect of an event or character. The use of the unreliable is a very important and unconventional narrative technique used by authors in creating an air of suspense and uncertainty around the story. An unreliable narrator is one whose rendering of the story and/or commentary on it the reader has reasons to suspect. The unreliability of a narrator can source from his limited knowledge, his personal involvement and his problematic value-scheme. The use of this narrative technique is especially very effective in detective fiction where after being misdirected throughout the text the reader is left baffled by the striking revelations at a late crisis point. Agatha Christie, known as the Queen of Crime, having penned crime novels that are most widely published and read, has used this technique in an ingenious and successful way in her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). As quoted in the essay “Narration: Levels and Voices” in the book Narrative Fiction by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “…when the outcome of the action proves the narrator wrong, a doubt is retrospectively cast over his reliability in reporting earlier event,” gives a substantial reason for the reader to question the reliability of the narrator, it however requiring the reading of the entire novel. In the aforesaid novel by Agatha Christie too the unreliability of the narrator cannot be established until the end
The drawing of narrative inferences by the reader is very important to interpret the work well. However, the author, while writing a story, can treat some incidents in detail and barely mention or even omit others. He may distort these incidents, may not observe chronological sequence, he can use messengers or flashbacks, and so on and so forth. The function of resorting to these varied narrative techniques is to emphasize or de-emphasize certain story-events, to interpret some and to leave others to inference, to show or to tell, to comment or to remain silent, to focus on this or that aspect of an event or character. The use of the unreliable is a very important and unconventional narrative technique used by authors in creating an air of suspense and uncertainty around the story. An unreliable narrator is one whose rendering of the story and/or commentary on it the reader has reasons to suspect. The unreliability of a narrator can source from his limited knowledge, his personal involvement and his problematic value-scheme. The use of this narrative technique is especially very effective in detective fiction where after being misdirected throughout the text the reader is left baffled by the striking revelations at a late crisis point. Agatha Christie, known as the Queen of Crime, having penned crime novels that are most widely published and read, has used this technique in an ingenious and successful way in her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). As quoted in the essay “Narration: Levels and Voices” in the book Narrative Fiction by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “…when the outcome of the action proves the narrator wrong, a doubt is retrospectively cast over his reliability in reporting earlier event,” gives a substantial reason for the reader to question the reliability of the narrator, it however requiring the reading of the entire novel. In the aforesaid novel by Agatha Christie too the unreliability of the narrator cannot be established until the end
Bibliography: Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1961 (2nd edition 1983) Christie Agatha Hawthron, Jeremy. A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, London: Arnold, 2000 Kereshner, R.B Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Roll No. 67 10th September, 2011