GretaOlson Reconsidering LJnreliability : Fallible and lJntrustworthy Narrators INTRODUCTION Why do we fail to trust somenarrators, and why do the tales other narrators tell strike us as incomplete? How do the phenomena of untrustworthyand fallible naffa- tion function within fictional texts,and how do readers respond to these kinds of nar- ration? In this essayI will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booth's introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narra- tion as a function of irony, sincethis formulationremains the leadingmodel for un- reliable naration. I will then describe how Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability hasbeencriticizedby Ansgar Nünning for disregarding the reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently definedconceptof the implied author. Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theoryof unreli- ability that rests on the reader'svalues and her sense that a discrepancy exists be- tween the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text. Nünning,I argue, overstates his case and ignores the structural similarities be- tweenhis and Booth's models.Both modelshavea tripartite structure that consists of ( I ) a reader who recognizes a dichotomy between(2')the personalized narrator's per- ceptions and expressions and (3) those of the implied author(or the textualsignals). Finally, I offer an updateof Booth's model by making his implicit differentiationbe- tween fallible and untrustworthynarrators explicit. Drawing on new research on un- reliability, I suggestthat these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and arebestdescribed usine scales for fallibility and trustworthiness.l Greta Olson is Visiting Prof'essor for Literature in the North America StudiesProgram at the Univer- sity of Bonn. She has publishedwork on Martin Heidegger's ethics,eating disorders in literature,and key- holes as liminal spaces in eighteenth-century novels, and is now working on a book on representations of criminals'bodies in English literature fiom Shakespeare to Conrad. NARRATIVE, Vol. ll. No. I (January 2003) Copyright2003 by The Ohio State University : := :=: ::= -t - -