Unheard Playful Voices: Margaret Atwood᾽s Grace Marks as an (Reliably) Unreliable Narrator
Keywords:
unreliable narrator, Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood, Tomáš Kubíček, historiographic metafictionAbstract
The unreliable narrator, a category with a question mark since the 1960s when it was identified by Wayne C. Booth, has been a challenge for many literary theorists including James Phelan, Monika Fludernik and Ansgar Nünning to name just a few. In the Czech Republic, Tomáš Kubíček attempted to address the issue of an unreliable narrator in his monograph Vypravěč, kategorie narativní analýzy [The Narrator, Categories of Narrative Analysis, 2007]. Drawing mostly on the theories of Nünning and Phelan, Kubíček provides his own definition, one that resolves several problematic issues with which his predecessors struggled. This paper aims to apply Kubíček’s theory of the unreliable narrator to Margaret Atwood’s historiographic metafiction Alias Grace (1996). Grace Marks, the novel’s homodiegetic narrator, has been frequently referred to as unreliable by numerous scholars, including Sharon R. Wilson and Coral Ann Howells. She appears to be an ideal subject for analyzing reliability, as she is a convicted criminal with (claimed) amnesia, therefore it seems natural that the reader should be wary of the facts she presents. However, in the light of Kubíček’s theory, the matter of Grace’s unreliability is not necessarily so obvious and simple. Obtaining a satisfactory answer to the question “Did Grace Marks commit the murders she was imprisoned for?” may be just as difficult as obtaining the answer to a question whether Atwood’s novel presents an unreliable narrator or not.
References
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. London: Virago Press, 1997.
Atwood, Margaret. In Search of Alias Grace. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1997.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Fludernik, Monika. “Defining (In)sanity: The Narrator of the ‘Yellow Wallpaper᾽and the Question of Unreliability.” In Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 75-95. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999.
Howells, Coral Ann. Contemporary Canadian Women᾽s Fiction: Refiguring Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood, second edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Kubíček, Tomáš, Jiří Hrabal and Petr A. Bílek. Naratologie, strukturální analýz a vyprávění. Praha: Dauphin, 2013.
Kubíček, Tomáš. Vypravěč, kategorie narativní analýzy. Brno: Host, 2007.
Lustig, Arnošt. Nemilovaná: Z deníku sedmnáctileté Perly Sch. Toronto: Sixty-eight, 1979.
Nünning, Ansgar. “Unreliable, Compared to What: Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses.” In Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, edited by Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach, 53-74. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999.
Neff, Vladimír. Trampoty pana Humbla. Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1967.
Olson, Greta. “Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators.” Narrative 11.1 (2003): 93-109.
Phelan, James. “Can Readers Infer What Authors Imply?” Lecture at an annual assembly of Modern Language Association. New Orleans, December 2001.
Phelan, James and Mary Patricia Martin. “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth:’ Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, edited by David Herman. 88-109. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.
Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. London: Methuen Publishing, 1983.
Schmid, Wolf. Narratology: An Introduction. Translated by Alexander Starritt. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
Wilson, Sharon Rose. “Quilting as Narrative Art: Metafictional Construction in Alias Grace.” In Margaret Atwood᾽s Textual Assassinations, edited by Sharon R. Wilson, 121-134. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004.
Wisker, Gina. Margaret Atwood᾽s Alias Grace. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002.
Yacobi, Tamar. “Interart Narrative: (Un)reliability and Ekphrasis.” Poetics Today 21.4 (2000): 711-749.
Zerweck, Bruno. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in Narrative Fiction.” Style 35.1 (2001): 151-178.
