ACT Reading — Humanities — Drill 3

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the article "The Unreliable Narrator and the Reader's Responsibility" by Thomas Akintola (©2021, Literary Studies Forum). The unreliable narrator has become one of contemporary fiction's most versatile tools. In its simplest form, unreliability means that the narrator's account of events cannot be fully trusted—that what she reports reflects her own biases, limitations, or self-deceptions rather than objective truth. But the more interesting question is not whether a narrator is unreliable, since in some sense all narrators are, but what the reader is supposed to do with that unreliability. The mechanics of unreliable narration were analyzed with particular rigor by literary critic Wayne Booth in his 1961 study The Rhetoric of Fiction, in which he introduced the concept of the "implied author"—the version of the author that a careful reader infers from the text as a whole, distinct from the narrator who tells the story. In an unreliable narration, the implied author and the narrator tell different stories simultaneously: the narrator says one thing while the text, read carefully, suggests another. The reader's task is to hold both stories at once. This double reading requires active participation. When the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, the repressed English butler Stevens, delivers a defense of his life of unquestioning service, the reader must simultaneously accept his account on its surface terms and read the grief and regret accumulating beneath it. Ishiguro provides clues—moments when Stevens's language strains against his emotions, when his praise of his employer becomes slightly too insistent—that signal the gap between what is said and what is meant. What makes this technique ethically interesting is that it mirrors a challenge readers face outside of fiction. People routinely encounter self-serving narratives—from politicians, advertisers, and acquaintances—and must decide how much weight to give them. The skills that allow a reader to hold an unreliable narrator's account lightly, to look for what is omitted or overstated, are skills with uses well beyond the novel. This, perhaps, is what great fiction consistently does: not simply to tell us stories, but to practice us in the kinds of reading that a complicated world requires.