Unreliable Narration and Dual Perspective

Abstract

In Unreliability and Point of View in Filmic Narration, Emar Maier makes a distinction between reliable and unreliable narrators. The latter, Maier claims, must be a first-person narrator, as an impersonal, third-person narrator lacks an individual perspective that can be unreliable (with some exceptions he sets aside). He concludes that most film adaptations of unreliably narrated novels are not themselves unreliably narrated, for they feature third person perspectives (not through the novel’s narrator’s eyes). I take Maier’s major claims to be (1) that there is a strict distinction between reliable and unreliable narration; and (2) that film shots displaying both a character and that character's hallucinations are not unreliable narration. I will challenge both.