NARRATING UNCERTAINTY: UNRELIABILITY, FOCALIZATION, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF TRUTH IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Abstract

Abstract

In much contemporary fiction, our relationships to story, memory, identity, and truth can be unsettling. Rather than viewing truth as knowable and transmittable through a single, authoritative voice, contemporary novels like those discussed in this paper invite us to help construct what we can know, what we misunderstand, and what we are not privy to. This paper compares narrative uncertainty in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, focusing on unreliability, focalization, retrospective narration, memory, and information disclosure. Kathy H., in Never Let Me Go, frames her retrospective first-person narration through limited knowledge, institutional influence, restraint in narration (often a function of emotional blockage), and memory, which selectively recalls some and not other details from her life; rather than being conventionally deceitful, Kathy’s limitations make accessible to readers the extent to which a person can live within institutions while lacking an understanding of their central tenets. Atonement relies more on shifting focalization, childhood perception and interpretation error, authorial withholding of details, and narrative revelation of imagined resolution to create uncertainty, and comparing the two books suggests that restricted focalization and unreliability are not exclusively tools with which to question the possibility of knowability of the truth of a text, story, or experience. Ultimately, comparing Never Let Me Go and Atonement shows how contemporary fiction can transform what we once considered a goal into a means. In this case, that means moving from the desire for truth to the more constructive process of understanding what it means to know, to remember, and to bear responsibility.