Unreliable Narrators Suffering from Trauma in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net

Document Type : Original Research

Authors
Malihe al-Sadat Banifatemi 1
Jalal Sokhanvar 2
1 PhD Student of English Literature, Islamic Azad University of Tehran, North-Branch, Tehran, Iran
2 Professor of English Literature, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
This is a comparative study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net. The main focus is on the role of trauma in the creation of unreliable narrators. Both Sartre and Murdoch have witnessed the horrors of World War II and it seems that their narratives are affected by such a terrible event. The characters look traumatized and suffer from the burden of the past which has never left them alone. In other words, past events have formed their identity and have rewritten their personality under the situation of World War II. Here, with the help of Wayne C. Booth’s theory of unreliable narrator, the narrators of the selected novels are scrutinized at the social and political contexts of the novels. Accordingly, considering this context and its consequent trauma, the research tries to reveal the presence and function of the unreliable narrators in the selected literary works.

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Subjects

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The International Journal of Humanities
Volume 27, Issue 4
Autumn 2020
Pages 32-41