5.2 Tension in the Discourse Level ............................ 36
CHAPTER VI READER MOTIVATION IN NARRATIVE PROCESS
6.1 Reconstruction of Ethical Principles
Linguist Adam Zachary Newton said, “Storytelling itself contains an ethical essence, so all narratives are ethical” (Narrative Ethics 11). According to Phelan, “Specific narrative texts establish their own ethical standards, either clearly or implicitly, to guide readers to make specific ethical judgments. That is to say, in terms of rhetorical ethics, narrative judgments are made from the inside out rather than from the outside in” (Experiencing Fiction 10). Phelan’s theory stressed the ethical side of rhetorical ends, highlighting narrative purposes and the effectiveness of ethical author-reader connection. Narrative rhetoric is driven by the author’s agency, textual phenomena, and reader responses. Readers must reconstruct the ethical principles in a text and determine the author’s ethical message to appropriately assess its ethical value. One of the challenges and pleasures of interpretation is finding the “right translation”, uncovering a code that allows us to claim cognitive understanding of the text, to hear the numerous signals of the text rearranging themselves into our new system of intelligibility. Virtually all texts, to one degree or another, present some obstacles to the interpreter, some material that initially seem resistant to whatever translation schema the interpreter is employing…Indeed, this desire for and faith in explanation is the enabling assumption of some of our best criticism (Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric 177-78)
CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION
The Collector, as Fowles’s famous work, captivated a number of researchers and critics due to its story content and distinctive narrative structure. The novel centers around the two protagonists’ first-person narrative, and tells the story of a depraved man who kidnaps and dominates a girl. This narrative allegorizes Fowles’ belief that the uncivilized majority oppresses the few genuine individuals in the world. This essay employs James Phelan’s theory of unreliable narrative to thoroughly examine the narrative process of the novel, with the aim of investigating the various ethical positions of readers as shown in The Collector.
The work portrays the narrations of the male protagonist, Clegg, and the female protagonist, Miranda. They possessed distinct qualities defined by Phelan as “estranging narrators” and “bonding narrators”, since they narrated in the first person. Clegg, the male character in this crime story, had the traits that distance him from the reader and prevent the reader from comprehending him. Miranda, in her role as the abducted and confined individual, hold the qualities that make her readily relevant to readers and deserving of their empathy. Parallel to this, the two’s lack of reliability as narrators is evident in their falsity regarding values and in terms of facts. The pervasive unreliability permeates the entirety of the narrative and propels its progression.
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