Interchange, Vol. 38/4, 335–350, 2007. © Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s10780-007-9035-y Research Fictions: Arts-Informed Narratives That Disrupt the Authority of the Text ELIZABETH DE FREITAS Adelphi University and University of Prince Edward Island ABSTRACT: In this paper I examine the dilemma faced by reflexive narrative inquirers who write in the first-person “I” while advocating for a postmodern reading of the “self.” This paper asks the question: How can the reflexive educational researcher craft a research narrative that, on the one hand, strives for self-presence, while on the other hand, denies the transparency of language? I discuss current post-structuralist critiques of educational research rhetoric, and extend the critique to narrative research, suggesting that an arts-informed approach to narrative allows researchers to disrupt the authority of their text. I explore the use of a specific fictionalizing technique – the unreliable narrator – to assist readers in critically deciphering reflexive research narratives. KEYWORDS: Unreliable narrator, narrative inquiry, reflexive research, arts-informed research, fiction. Maggie Maclure (2003) argues that all educational research texts are fabrications, and that neutrality and realism are “the most spectacular” signs of rhetorical artfulness (p. 80). Research texts are granted authority, claims Maclure, when they erase their own artfulness and appear to be transparent in their persuasiveness, as though unproblematic in their relation to the external or internal situation that they describe. Narrative and life history research, according to Maclure, are often taken up and read as though they were realist depictions of both internal emotional states and external circumstances (p. 81). Maclure outlines an agenda for disrupting and interrupting the process by which narrative research is taken uncritically to represent lived experience. She asks that qualitative researchers attend more rigorously to the ways in which their narratives are fabrications. She asks that we become highly critical and highly skeptical of the narratives we select to circulate. Maclure wants readers to become conscious of the textualizing strategies that shape research narratives. Patti Lather shares a similar concern: