Unreliable narrator

For example, in the three interweaving plays of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests, each confines the action to one of three locations during the course of a weekend.

"[4] Peter J. Rabinowitz criticized Booth's definition for relying too much on facts external to the narrative, such as norms and ethics, which must necessarily be tainted by personal opinion.

He debates the issues of truth in fiction, bringing forward four types of audience who serve as receptors of any given literary work: Rabinowitz suggests that "In the proper reading of a novel, then, events which are portrayed must be treated as both 'true' and 'untrue' at the same time.

It is neither the reader's intuitions nor the implied author's norms and values that provide the clue to a narrator's unreliability, but a broad range of definable signals.

Nünning thus effectively eliminates the reliance on value judgments and moral codes which are always tainted by personal outlook and taste.

Greta Olson recently debated both Nünning's and Booth's models, revealing discrepancies in their respective views.

Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Nünning for disregarding the reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of the implied author.

Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text.and offers "an update of Booth's model by making his implicit differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit".

Olson then argues "that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and untrustworthiness.