#wayne booth

Booth, of course, argues that the easiest way to establish the characteristics and locations of implied authors and narrators is to examine cases of irony. In an unreliable verbal narrative, specifically, the narrator does not speak “for the norms of the work,” which the implied author establishes and which the reader understands; the implied author winks at the reader behind the narrator’s back, as it were. These narrators, misaligned with their implied authors, misinterpret or misevaluate the events they relate. In order to construct a coherent narrative out of flawed data, then, the reader must be able to differentiate between the narrator’s voice and the agent behind it.

-Emily R. Anderson, Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, “Fight Club”, and the Cinematic Narrator