This essay will explore the narrative perspective of Herman Melville’s’ ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and Peter Carrey’s’ ‘American Dreams’ and how narration can affect the way in which a story is read. Both of these authors use the narrator to tell the story in a different manner, all with different perspectives. McCall states “narrators are unreliable by definition. Fiction told in the first person is inherently deceptive” (1989, p.106) and this biased point of view obviously affects the readers perception of the story and how the message is conveyed. Any literature written from the point of view of another character would be completely different and hold another perspective entirely and would therefore show the reader a different account. A
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Unreliable narrators can leave the whole account feeling untrustworthy and misleading and also forces the reader to think about the story from another perspective. This is a tool many authors use to encourage a deeper level of thinking and create more layers within the narrative (Crossen, 2011). This unreliability of the narrator can also make them a more relatable, human figure and this can help the reader connect.
Herman Melville’s lawyer in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ has often been called an unreliable narrator (McCall, 1989, p.99) and this greatly affects the story and the message that is conveyed. The lawyer spends a large amount of time focussing on redeeming himself rather than actually helping Bartleby, even stating “here I can cheaply purchase delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humour him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience” (Melville, 1853). He …show more content…
Melville’s lawyer although generally considered an unreliable narrator is an everyman figure that many can relate to, making the story more engaging as well as interesting with many different layers. The point of view of the lawyer is one that is still analysed today over 150 years after being written. In comparison Carey’s young boy attempts to include other perspectives in his narrative and Carey uses his point of view to show the conflict between reality and representation, a theme echoed throughout the story. Both authors use the tool of narration in different ways and to different
Unreliable narrators can leave the whole account feeling untrustworthy and misleading and also forces the reader to think about the story from another perspective. This is a tool many authors use to encourage a deeper level of thinking and create more layers within the narrative (Crossen, 2011). This unreliability of the narrator can also make them a more relatable, human figure and this can help the reader connect.
Herman Melville’s lawyer in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ has often been called an unreliable narrator (McCall, 1989, p.99) and this greatly affects the story and the message that is conveyed. The lawyer spends a large amount of time focussing on redeeming himself rather than actually helping Bartleby, even stating “here I can cheaply purchase delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humour him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience” (Melville, 1853). He …show more content…
Melville’s lawyer although generally considered an unreliable narrator is an everyman figure that many can relate to, making the story more engaging as well as interesting with many different layers. The point of view of the lawyer is one that is still analysed today over 150 years after being written. In comparison Carey’s young boy attempts to include other perspectives in his narrative and Carey uses his point of view to show the conflict between reality and representation, a theme echoed throughout the story. Both authors use the tool of narration in different ways and to different