UNRELIABILITY IN THE SHORT STORY “BRIDGE OF MUSIC, RIVER OF SAND” BY WILLIAM GOYEN
UNRELIABILITY IN THE SHORT STORY “BRIDGE OF MUSIC, RIVER OF SAND” BY WILLIAM GOYEN

Summary/Abstract: Unreliability is a narratological concept that is gaining more and more popularity in literary studies due to the insights it collocates from different approaches and its increasing use in contemporary literary fiction. The article draws on the multidisciplinary study of unreliability that combines the rhetorical and the cognitive approaches with a view to systematizing the categories and the criteria of unreliability in English literary fiction and identifying the array of discourse markers and clues that signal unreliable narrators. Generalizing from the results in the study of unreliability advanced by Ansgar Nünning, James Phelan, Vera Nünning and Monika Fludernik, the article seeks to analyze the manifestation of unreliability in the short story “Bridge of Music, River of Sand” by W. Goyen. The study focuses on two dimensions of the literary narrative, the narrative content, i.e., story, and the narrative form, also termed discourse, in order to determine the types and means of projecting the unreliable narrator in the selected text as well as the cognitive and epistemic functions of unreliability that impact on the reader’s reception of the content.

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