THE UNRELIABLE NARRATION IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH FICTION: INTERPRETING PERSPECTIVE AND TRUTH

Abstract

Unreliable narration is a central device in contemporary fiction because it makes readers question how perspective shapes what can be accepted as truth. This article offers a comparative literary and stylistic reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Drawing on narratology, stylistics, and discourse analysis, the study examines narrative voice, focalization, inference, modality, memory, evaluation, omission, and revision as devices through which narrators guide, restrict, or redirect interpretation. The results identify four dominant patterns: interpretive overreach and retrospective reconstruction in Atonement; normalized limitation of perspective in Never Let Me Go; self-protective memory in The Sense of an Ending; and strategic manipulation of narrative evidence in Gone Girl. The comparison shows that uncertainty does not automatically make a narrator unreliable. Qualified or hesitant narration may strengthen credibility, whereas confident interpretation based on limited perspective may weaken it. The article proposes a recursive model of unreliable narration in which a narrative claim is presented from a particular perspective, provisionally interpreted by the reader, challenged by competing information, and reconsidered in light of later disclosure. Truth in these novels therefore emerges through interpretation and rereading rather than through a single stable narrative voice.