Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is an excellent writer with a great diversity of works including poems, short fictions, and literary theories in the 19th century. His stories are usually connected with the supernatural events shrouded in a weird and bleak atmosphere, which also provide penetrating insight into the mental state, especially psychological problem of the unreliable first-person narrators. One of his short story, William Wilson, is a mixture of surrealism and Gothic sentiment, in which the narrator tells the story of a schizophrenic who commits suicide from the first-person narrative situation. The author adopted the unreliability of the narrator as a rhetorical strategy. Based on the leading figure of Narratology, James Phelan’s theories about unreliable narration, this paper interpreted the unreliable narration in William Wilson from three axes including the facts, the ethics and the perception, which purports to grasp the connotation of the narrator and the complex plurality of the narrator's identity construction at the textual level as a whole.
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How to cite this paper
A Study of the Unreliable Narration in William Wilson
How to cite this paper: Meng Li. (2023) A Study of the Unreliable Narration in William Wilson. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 7(5), 913-916.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2023.05.006