Stories in Disguise: On Odysseus' Ithacan Lies and Their Relevance ...

is not, the communication is performed through the broken line above. Hence, according to its
ironic nature "unreliable narration" offers two messages, one credible the other not.
My own analysis has not taken recourse to the notion of an implied author but has instead
set the "storyteller" in that position. But this does not really matter for the structural analysis
which is content with distinguishing two complementary levels, one of norms and one of drama.
According to Marie Laure Ryan there are three possible means for the implied author to
correct the false assertions of an "unreliable narrator":
(1) the narrator could himself reveal the faulty information after it has been given;
(2) another narrator could give the straight information that will correct the false one;
(3) the implied discourse of the narrator could reveal how the message is actually to be
understood. 10
Ryan exemplifies the first possibility with Borges' "The Shape of the Sword". In this short story a
narrator relates how he met with a villain and how it all turned out. After telling this the narrator
reveals that the villain, up to now referred to as "he", is in fact the narrator himself, while the
hero of the story, hitherto referred to as "I", should instead be understood as "he". The second
method is manifested by "polyvocal" narratives like Laclos' epistolary novel Les Liaisons
danguereuses where one reliable correspondent may correct another less reliable. She also
mentions Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury where four voices are heard in turn, three personal,
Benjy's, Quentin's and Jason's, and one anonymous and impersonal. This impersonal voice,
which should be understood as the most trustworthy, reveals for instance that Jason is an
unreliable narrator. The third possibility, revelation by the implied discourse of the author, is
exemplified by Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al and Albert Camus' La Chute. However,
according to Ryan this method "leads to much more problematic diagnoses" than the two
mentioned above:
The narrator's declarations should thus contain both an accurate representation of the narrated
state of affairs, and hints of their own deficiency, such as uncorrected internal contradictions, or
blatant lack of fit between the reported events and their evaluation. These types of clues can be
used to raise doubts in the reader's mind as to the soundness of the narrator's judgment [...] but
they are too ambiguous to demonstrate deliberate insincerity or faulty information. When a
narrator is lying outright (a very rare case), or clearly mistaken as to how things are in the world
he descibes, he can only be caught by the explicit discourse of the first two method. 11
But in my opinion, only the last and most "problematic" method complies with the Boothian
concept of an "unreliable narrator" violating implicit superior norms of the narrative. Speaking of
the "unreliable narrator" as a literary device, or technique, with its own anticipated aesthetic
effects, should imply that we are offered continual textual signals that expose this narrator as
faulty (as self-deceptive, naïve etc.), i.e. not entrusted with the "whole" story. Methods one and
two never use any formal or technical means to let us understand that the narrator is dramatized
in this way. It is hard to understand then why such a narrator's account should be taken as
"unreliable" at all by us who have nothing to do with information internal to a fictional world but
only with the significance of a representation of such a "world." From a formalistic point of view
it would be just as correct to say that we are presented with two different stories within an
inconsistent work. Certainly the latter refers to the former but that does not imply that it could
provide it with the specific device which will make us identify it as "unreliable narration". The
reader should not be hoodwinked by a literary device; rather we think of techniques and devices
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