Narrative Cracks: Reconsidering Intentionality in Unreliable Narration in The Remains of the Day and The Moonstone

Since Wayne Booth’s coinage of the term “unreliable narrator,” much critical ink has been spilled over the instances where the reliability of a narrator’s account is compromised, though without exploring the effects of the narrator’s intentional agency on unreliability. This study introduces the narratorial intent across the three levels of unreliable narration offered by Olson as a factor designating the disposition of a narrator and the gap between the implied reader and the narrator. With a rhetorical narratological approach that is in dialogue with cognitivist/constructivist approaches, the butler-narrators Stevens and Betteredge, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) respectively, will be analyzed in terms of how the difference in their narratorial intent pertains to their being diametrically opposed unreliable narrators. It is claimed that the lack of intrinsic motivation distances Betteredge from the implied reader and makes him an untrustworthy narrator while strong narratorial intent and agency bonds Stevens’s audience to his narration and shows him as an unreliable, yet fallible, narrator.