Literary studies: TestAS practice testlets

Readers usually trust what a narrator tells them. An unreliable narrator is one whose account the reader has reason to doubt. The term was introduced by the critic Wayne C. Booth in 1961. Unreliability does not necessarily mean that the narrator lies; it may result from limited understanding, as with a child narrator, from self-deception, from strong emotions or prejudices, or from mental confusion.

Texts signal unreliability in several ways. The narrator may contradict himself or herself, or report facts that do not fit the interpretation given to them. Other characters may react in ways that suggest a different view of events. The narrator may insist too much on his or her own honesty or innocence, or may leave obvious gaps. Readers then reconstruct a second story behind the one that is told, and much of the pleasure of such texts lies in this reconstruction.

Unreliable narration is found in many classic works. In Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator insists that he is not mad while describing a murder in terrifying detail. In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens gradually reveals, without fully admitting it, that he has wasted his life serving a master who sympathised with fascism. Such texts often invite the reader to judge the narrator, and in doing so to reflect on their own habits of self-justification. The effect depends on the reader noticing the signals, and some readers of such texts do not notice them at all, taking the narrator's account at face value.

The following passage is an original text written for practice purposes.

"I have always been the most patient of neighbours. Everyone in the building will tell you so, although, as it happens, nobody in the building speaks to me any more. When the Hoffmanns moved in below, I welcomed them warmly: I left a note on their door the very first evening, explaining the house rules about noise, and a second note the next morning, in case they had not understood. I only knocked on their ceiling with the broom when it was truly necessary, perhaps three or four times an evening. Mrs Hoffmann once asked me, in a rather unpleasant tone, whether I ever slept. I told her I would sleep very well if certain people learned to walk quietly. The caretaker says the Hoffmanns are moving out next month. I cannot imagine why. I was only ever friendly."

Early literary criticism often assumed that the meaning of a text lies in the author's intention or in the text itself. From the 1960s, several approaches turned attention to the reader. In Germany, the Konstanz school of reception aesthetics, led by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, argued that meaning arises only in the act of reading.

Jauss introduced the concept of the horizon of expectations: every reader approaches a text with expectations shaped by earlier reading, genre conventions and the experience of their time. A text may confirm these expectations or break them, and its reception changes as horizons change. A novel that shocked readers in the nineteenth century may seem harmless today, while a text that was ignored may later be read as a masterpiece. The history of literature is therefore also a history of its reception.

Iser concentrated on the individual act of reading. He argued that every text contains gaps, or Leerstellen: things that are not said, connections that are not explained, decisions that are not motivated. Readers fill these gaps with their own ideas and in doing so take part in creating the meaning. Texts that leave many gaps invite more active reading, and different readers may fill the same gap in different ways, within limits set by the text.

A related concept is intertextuality, a term introduced by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. It expresses the idea that every text is connected to other texts: it quotes, alludes to, imitates, parodies or rewrites them. Recognising such references can change a reading completely. A modern story that retells a myth or a fairy tale gains meaning from the differences between the old and the new version.

The following short text is an original piece written for practice purposes. "The prince climbed the tower, as the old stories required. He found the room at the top, the spinning wheel in the corner, the dust on the floor. The bed was empty and the window open. On the pillow lay a note in a firm hand: Gone to university. Do not wait. The prince sat down on the bed and, for the first time in a hundred years, the house was quiet enough to hear the birds."