It helps to have read Emma, Tristram Shandy, Samuel Beckett's Company, some Dafoe, some Swift, and whole lot of Henry James, to really piece this work together. Booth is primarily concerned with the relationship between the narrator, the implied author, and the reader. I think he is one of the first to use the term "unreliable narrator" to describe the critical distance required when reading a first person narrative.

I enjoyed his analysis of Austen's Emma the most, as I recently reread it and appreciated his commentary on Austen's use of narrative voice to gain the both the reader's sympathy and approbation for her heroine.

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got to page 283. it's really good to learn the basic principles of the craft, but then I wanted works that dealt with the art of short stories specifically.

(Original Review, 1981-03-28)

When Booth came up with the idea of the "unreliable narrator," he wasn't speaking to writers; he was reminding critics and teachers and readers in general of something every decent writer of fiction has always known: that a narrator is a voice, and a voice is a character, and is still a character - a created fictional person - whether it has a name or is just an apparently omniscient intermediary. The idea that this particular character must for some reason be an honest (much less an accurate) portrait of the author himself is just silly, but it's a silliness that a great many critics once allowed themselves to fall into. If Hammett's voice in Falcon is anything, it's purposeful and controlled, and he had to have worked very hard on it. The idea that that voice must also be Hammett or Heinlein themselves... well, I don't think fatuous is too strong a word. We have had very little of that kind of fatuous talk around here (thank goodness), but at times we – me, as much as anyone – have gone off in the opposite direction and assumed that because we can find something in Falcon Hammett or in Strange Heinlein, must have meant for it to matter more than the story itself. In other words, I know there’s a line but I don’t know exactly where to draw it - and I suppose that all I want from you is a reassurance that you agree that that line is lurking somewhere quite close by.

This is one of the books that made me appreciate Robert A. Heinlein even more. [2018 EDIT: And K. J. Parker in this day and age; if you want to know what it means to write sucessful "unreliable narrators" look no further.]

(By the way, the idea that there are male equivalents to femmes fatales is strangely familiar to me...) ( )

Great read! I learned a lot about why authors in the post-Flaubert/Henry James era of modern fiction became so obsessed with eliminating all traces of narratorial commentary from their novels (that is, why modern fiction sought to privilege "showing" over "telling"), and Booth does a great job of questioning what should certainly be seen as an ideological insistence on certain modes of storytelling that only rarely question their own premises. That is, if Henry James was really quite responsible and dedicated in his discussions of why the presentation of dramatic scenes where stories more or less tell themselves, he also seemed to understand that this was an ideal that no text achieves. As Booth demonstrates, you can disguise the "telling" of a story in a lot of different ways so that it looks like the narrator isn't intruding on the narrative and injecting his or her own subjective views on the matter at hand, but you can't completely avoid using strategies that show your hand as the story's creator in various subtle ways.

The Rhetoric of Fiction gives some great practical guidance for readers of novels. I feel like I'm much more attuned to some of the subtleties of novel writing than I was before. I don't necessarily agree with his overarching concern with rescuing a certain moral function for the novel (that is, as he himself admits in an afterword written 20 years after the book's original publication, he is rather overzealous in his condemnation of books like Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit due to their immorality), but his own historically-situated conclusions don't take anything away from his analyses of modern fiction. And, in fact, they're challenging in that I don't want to agree with his insistence on the moral function of fiction, but I'm not sure I have good reasons for disagreeing.

It's always refreshing to read classics like this, and I'd definitely recommend it. The Rhetoric of Fiction helped me understand late-19th and early-20th century literature in ways I hadn't necessarily thought of before. ( )