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Abstract
Readers often have passionate responses (both positive and negative) to books that first manipulate them into believing a seeming ‘truth’ about the narrative only to later discover that they have been deliberately fooled. In most cases readers are aware of the fictional status of these novels, which will be termed ‘trickeries’. Why, then, do readers exhibit such outrage towards changes in a world which is known to be invented? This thesis argues that in the case of trickeries the conventional reading process (which encompasses readerly expectations as set up by the narrative in conference with the reader’s knowledge about narrative and fiction) is used against the reader as the means through which they might be manipulated for a variety of purposes.
Ongoing contentious debates surrounding certain narratological phenomena have tended to focus on conventional fiction as the basis for extrapolating data in support of various arguments. This study exploring narrative trickeries – the literary aberrations, the marked fiction – provides a new perspective on these debates, and in the process reveals fresh insights into the conventional processes of writing and reading fiction. This thesis explores how historically-shifting and supposedly dichotomous notions such as ‘truth/lies’ and ‘fiction/nonfiction’ inform the current circumstances in which contemporary readers consume literature. It is argued that this context provides the necessary conditions for a great proliferation of contemporary ‘trickeries’.
In this thesis different types of trickeries are identified and anatomised in order to explore four different narratological phenomena which divide scholarly opinion: the narrative communication model; the storyworld; fictionality; and the paratext. In this pursuit, a narratological analysis is conducted of four contemporary English-language texts: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth (the unexpected twist); John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (the frustrated-expectations novel); William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (the fictional(ised) memoir); and, Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper (the hoax). These analyses of trickeries provide an understanding of not only the textual mechanics at play (and thus the role of the author), but also of readerly responses, and thus the active, agential role the contemporary reader plays in the holistic process of contemporary fiction.