Reconsidering Narrative Unreliability in Robert Coover’s “The Dead Queen”
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This article reexamines the concept of narrative unreliability through the narration of Robert Coover’s first-person narrator in “The Dead Queen” and looks into the implication of narrative unreliability in the context of postmodern fairytale retellings. The article begins with the limitation of the traditional/Boothian approach to unreliable narration, which focuses on the ironic distance between the narrator and the implied author based on the “norms and values” presented through the textual signals. Such a text-centered approach is inappropriate in Coover’s “The Dead Queen,” for it overlooks the contextual fact that “The Dead Queen” is a postmodern retelling of the nineteenth-century tale. Siding with Bruno Zerwick’s conception of narrative unreliability as a culturally and historically determined phenomenon, this article then goes beyond the textual boundary and considers the contextual factors in determining narrative unreliability. It specifically looks into the moments in “The Dead Queen” in which the prince, the narrator, experiences the clash of the two historically distinct values and how he struggles to deal with the awkward coexistence of the two. In the world of retellings where the two different historical worlds are meshed together, the norms and values become problematized; hence, the task to figure out what “really happened” and the attempt to address the narrator’s narrative unreliability becomes meaningless. Through a detailed analysis of the narrator’s conflicting moments, this article calls for a new understanding of narrative unreliability in the postmodern fairytale retellings.
Abstract
This article reexamines the concept of narrative unreliability through the narration of Robert Coover’s first-person narrator in “The Dead Queen” and looks into the implication of narrative unreliability in the context of postmodern fairytale retellings. The article begins with the limitation of the traditional/Boothian approach to unreliable narration, which focuses on the ironic distance between the narrator and the implied author based on the “norms and values” presented through the textual signals. Such a text-centered approach is inappropriate in Coover’s “The Dead Queen,” for it overlooks the contextual fact that “The Dead Queen” is a postmodern retelling of the nineteenth-century tale. Siding with Bruno Zerwick’s conception of narrative unreliability as a culturally and historically determined phenomenon, this article then goes beyond the textual boundary and considers the contextual factors in determining narrative unreliability. It specifically looks into the moments in “The Dead Queen” in which the prince, the narrator, experiences the clash of the two historically distinct values and how he struggles to deal with the awkward coexistence of the two. In the world of retellings where the two different historical worlds are meshed together, the norms and values become problematized; hence, the task to figure out what “really happened” and the attempt to address the narrator’s narrative unreliability becomes meaningless. Through a detailed analysis of the narrator’s conflicting moments, this article calls for a new understanding of narrative unreliability in the postmodern fairytale retellings.
참고문헌 (17)
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