Unreliable Narration in W. Golding’s Novel “Rites of Passage”

Abstract

The article is dedicated to unreliable narration in W. Golding’s “Rites of Passage”. The article contains descriptions of various authorial markers of unreliability, such as the characters’ direct and indirect speech, as well as their non-verbal reactions, contradictions between the narrator’s and the implied reader’s views and ethical norms, allusions to the texts by Golding and other authors, informational gaps, the narrator’s accounts of his dreams, the narrator’s writing style, contradictions between two narrators. The article explores how the constantly changing level of unreliability prepares the reader for the complicated journey through the text. The article shows how unreliability is used to introduce one of the central philosophical ideas of the novel — incomprehensibility of life and limitations of human cognitive abilities. Refs 12.