第一人称叙事与可靠性问题

讲故事人有时代表隐含作者的价值观和道德信仰,他是隐含作者戴的面具和传声筒,是可靠叙事人。但有时隐含作者让受述人与第一人称叙事人享有共知信息,使某些人物处于弱势,叙事产生戏剧反讽,叙事人有讽刺性质。而当隐含作者让叙事人在讲故事的同时无意中暴露自己的各种短处成为不可靠叙事人时,隐含作者就具有讽刺性质。第一人称叙事人难免孤陋寡闻,但他和读者近距离交流,使读者领略尘封久远的历史。第一人称的有限性被隐合作者用来挖掘与叙事人之间的差异,构成纷繁多姿的艺术魅力。

First Person Narration and the Problem of Reliability

When an "I" story_teller represents the value system and ethics of the implied author, he becomes his spokesman and his mask and is called a reliable narrator. But sometimes the implied author creates a first_person narrator who favours his reader with knowledge which is denied to other characters. Such a narrator is ironic in the sense that other characters are excluded in the narrator_reader communication. There are also times when we have a narrator who is victimized by his creator because he gets exposed in the process of telling, and readers are intended to laugh at him. When that happens, we have an ironic implied author, who forms a secret tie with the reader. Though limited by nature, the first_person narrator has the advantage of winning over his reader, who shares his recollections of the historical past. In the meantime the limitation is manipulated by the implied author who gets to explore his discrepancies with the narrator, making it possible to produce artistic tensions of various kinds.