The Language of Stories (Cambridge Studies in Cognitive Linguistics)

Primarily, unreliable narrators are presented as only capable of a very specific epistemic viewpoint, so that the narrowness of the understanding of events strikes the reader as inaccurate.

I have assumed that the SV-space is to be treated as ‘present,’ since the narrating is always done in the narration’s present.

Second-person narratives (cf. Fludernik 1994)

The stylistic dimension (choice of register, degree of distance) thus seems to create the quality of narration which obliterates or highlights the viewpoints profiled.

The third person in all of the instances discussed above is a device setting up a deictic centre of the narrating subjectivity outside of the main narrative space.

The intrusive narrator requires that the reader or ‘narratee’ blend him/herself with the position of the addressee in the fictional deictic set-up of the SV-space.

The narrator’s voice in the first paragraphs is only used to give the setting and the atmosphere of the first scene, but the narrator’s presence is thus defined for the duration of the novel.

The narrator is thus off-stage (does not speak as an independent subjectivity), but all that is said about Delia is relayed through the SV-space, which is located temporally later with respect to the main narrative space.

This ‘outer’ narrative space, which I introduced above as ‘story-viewpoint space’ (SV-space), usually has little or no topology of its own in terms of time, setting, events, or subjectivities, but it houses a vantage point with the rest of the narrative in its scope.

the narrator’s mention of critics also sets up a metanarrative space, where the entire novel and its discourse are available for independent evaluation.