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slightly suspicious of Boyne and the fact that there is a gap between his nar-
ration and the story being told. He is what is known as an  unreliable narra-
tor because we suspect that he is twisting the truth to suit himself and if we
were to hear another narrator s account, it would tell a different story. This
kind of narrator is often deployed when there are issues of morality at stake;
Argument 57
Statements about what the My questions
text is saying
Paragraph 1
Boyne was feeling increasingly that Is his relationship with Mrs Sellars built
he could only love Rose Sellars when entirely in his mind? Has he always had
they were apart. the wrong impression of her? Or is it
that in the past they did agree on
matters but now she challenges what
he says and he just doesn t like it?
Paragraph 2
She was much younger than he d Has he been comparing her with Judith
remembered but they found it hard so he d remembered her as really old?
to talk to each other. He could only Is she suspicious of his feelings for
have imaginary conversations Judith and this is making conversation
with her. difficult?
Paragraph 3
When he got away from her he was Is he deluding himself by imagining
able to feel calm by resuming the things he d like her to say? What if she
kind of imaginary conversations they still criticises him because she s
had before. concerned about his attachment not
just to the children but especially to
Judith?
She thought his attachment to the Surely she is not going to change
children was unreasonable but he her mind? Wouldn t we hear
was sure she would soon change something quite different if the story
her mind. was told from Mrs Sellars s point of
view? Does Mrs Sellars represent the
view of society? The reader?
Edith Wharton?
famous unreliable narrators in literature include Humbert Humbert in
Nabokov s Lolita (1955), guilty of paedophilia, murderers Patrick Bateman in
American Psycho (1991) by Brett Easton Ellis, and Frederick Clegg in The
Collector (1963) by John Fowles. In these examples there is a gap, a dialogue,
between the narrator s morality and that of the author. Having determined
that Boyne is unreliable, it would now be worth examining the rest of the text
for other types of narrative (direct speech, alternative points of view) to see if
his assessment of the situation is challenged. Indeed, it would be a rewarding
act of creative criticism to rewrite scenes from the novel from Rose Sellars s
perspective.
58 Studying English Literature
Response
Now try the folded-paper activity on a literary text you are currently studying.
We can see that in folding the paper we are undertaking two activities: the first,
on the left-hand side, is an act of comprehension, an attempt to pick out and
summarise the key point of each paragraph or section; the second, on the
right, is an exploratory challenge to these ideas. It is a tentative challenge
because at this stage you are not going to show it to anyone, so you are free to
try things out, to experiment. But it s also worth stressing how important the
first part of the exercise is. Writing something down is certainly a way to dis-
cover whether you have understood what you are reading. As I stressed at the
end of chapter 2: Reading, reading as an academic activity often involves
writing, so that your reading (your interpretation) can be identified on paper.
The folded-paper activity can help you to recognise uncertainties in your
reading and ambiguities in a text that can be raised in a seminar or form a
point of discussion in an essay. If your starting point was a literary text, the
next stage of the process might be to select a critical text to test or answer the
questions you raised on the left-hand side of your paper.
3.4.2 Example of a folded-paper dialogue with a critical text
in order to prepare a dialogue for an essay or seminar
discussion
The writing of Raymond Williams crossed many disciplines including fiction,
drama and journalism, but it is for his work as a cultural materialist that he is
most widely known; indeed he is credited as one of the originators of Cultural
Studies. Williams s work is concerned with charting the relationship between
social and intellectual history since the Industrial Revolution. Two of his most
important works, Culture and Society (1958) and Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (1976; revised and expanded version 1983), examine the
changing meanings of words like  democracy ,  class ,  art and  culture . His
critics find fault with his readings of novels as largely realist forms, refusing to
consider symbolic possibilities, for example, and more vociferously, his failure [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]