Misplaced Pages

#11988

28-661: Nghi Vo (born December 4, 1981) is an American author of short stories, novellas, and novels. Vo's fantasy novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune has received acclaim and won the Hugo Award for Best Novella and the IAFA Crawford Award . Vo was born in Peoria, Illinois , where she lived until attending college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . In 2007 she moved to Milwaukee , Wisconsin on

56-418: A classification of unreliable narrators. William Riggan analysed in a 1981 study four discernible types of unreliable narrators, focusing on the first-person narrator as this is the most common kind of unreliable narration. Riggan provides the following definitions and examples to illustrate his classifications: It remains a matter of debate whether and how a non-first-person narrator can be unreliable, though

84-547: A mystery. Additionally, her relationship with In-yo is complicated by their disparate wealth and social status. Chih records others' stories but not their own. The story of In-yo is relayed to Chih by Rabbit, an unreliable narrator . Because Rabbit has her own motivations which are revealed through the story, the reader must determine if she is leaving anything out. The worldbuilding of the story meshes elements from various real-life Asian cultures and languages, including China and Vietnam. The novel received critical praise. It

112-501: A narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author 's norms), unreliable when he does not." Peter J. Rabinowitz criticized Booth's definition for relying too much on facts external to the narrative, such as norms and ethics, which must necessarily be tainted by personal opinion. He consequently modified the approach to unreliable narration. There are unreliable narrators (c.f. Booth). An unreliable narrator however,

140-522: A pilgrimage, an excuse for leaving her exile in Thriving Fortune. She effects the replacement of her original caravan of servants and staff with northern warriors, allowing her to throw off Empire custody. A palace official executes Sukai, and his head is delivered to In-yo while on the pilgrimage. After their return to Thriving Fortune, Rabbit gives birth to Sukai’s daughter; In-yo presents the child as her own miraculous birth. She leads an army to

168-460: Is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in fiction and film, and range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are almost by definition first-person narrators , arguments have been made for the existence of unreliable second- and third-person narrators , especially within the context of film and television, but sometimes also in literature. The term “unreliable narrator”

196-596: Is a queer fantasy adaptation of The Great Gatsby which reimagines the character of Jordan Baker as a woman of Vietnamese descent who was taken to Louisville as a young child and raised by a wealthy, white American family. Vo's second novel, Siren Queen , an urban fantasy set in pre- Code Hollywood, was released in May 2022. The Empress of Salt and Fortune Cleric Chih of the Singing Hills Monastery visits an abandoned palace, Thriving Fortune, after

224-513: Is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience but by the standards of his own narrative audience. ... In other words, all fictional narrators are false in that they are imitations. But some are imitations who tell

252-841: The Ignyte Award . It was followed by When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain . The novellas are part of the Singing Hills Cycle , with three more novellas having been acquired for Tor.com . Since the deal, Into the Riverlands has been published and Mammoths at the Gates was released in 2023. The novellas can be read in any order. Her debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful , was published in 2021. The novel

280-477: The "unreliability" of the main character (Mr Stevens) as a narrator to work, we need to believe that he describes events reliably, while interpreting them in an unreliable way. Wayne C. Booth was among the first critics to formulate a reader-centered approach to unreliable narration and to distinguish between a reliable and unreliable narrator on the grounds of whether the narrator's speech violates or conforms with general norms and values. He writes, "I have called

308-512: The capital, the Emperor is killed, and In-yo takes the throne. She has recently died and has been succeeded by her heir, secretly Rabbit's daughter. Chih honors Rabbit as the mother of the new Empress. Rabbit disappears in the night, and Chih leaves Thriving Fortune for the capital and the Empress's coronation. Strange Horizons noted that the novel subverts the reader's expectations regarding

SECTION 10

#1732787297012

336-418: The context of frame theory and of readers' cognitive strategies. ... to determine a narrator's unreliability one need not rely merely on intuitive judgments. It is neither the reader's intuitions nor the implied author's norms and values that provide the clue to a narrator's unreliability, but a broad range of definable signals. These include both textual data and the reader's preexisting conceptual knowledge of

364-455: The death of In-yo, the Empress of Salt and Fortune. They are accompanied by a talking hoopoe named Almost Brilliant. On arrival they meet Rabbit, an elderly woman who was once the Empress’s servant. She tells Chih about Empress In-yo’s life as they catalogue the contents of the palace. In-yo was a northern princess married to the Emperor of Pines and Steel as the empire solidified its control of

392-507: The deliberate restriction of information to the audience can provide instances of unreliable narrative , even if not necessarily of an unreliable narrator . For example, in the three interweaving plays of Alan Ayckbourn 's The Norman Conquests , each confines the action to one of three locations during the course of a weekend. Kathleen Wall argues that in The Remains of the Day , for

420-419: The device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability. This model allows for all shades of grey in between the poles of trustworthiness and unreliability. It is consequently up to each individual reader to determine the credibility of a narrator in a fictional text. Whichever definition of unreliability one follows, there are

448-450: The importance of "side characters" and the "protagonist". Although In-yo might be considered the protagonist because her actions move the plot forward, Rabbit's life story is given equal prominence. Though she is a peasant girl, her relationship with the empress provides an emotional core to the novella. The novella also explores disenfranchisement, oppression, and classism. Rabbit never shares her given name, and much of her background remains

476-431: The narrator's account (c.f. signals of unreliable narration ). Nünning thus effectively eliminates the reliance on value judgments and moral codes which are always tainted by personal outlook and taste. Greta Olson recently debated both Nünning's and Booth's models, revealing discrepancies in their respective views. Booth's text-immanent model of narrator unreliability has been criticized by Ansgar Nünning for disregarding

504-423: The narrator's unreliability is made immediately evident. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to the character's unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. In some cases,

532-470: The north. After she gives birth to his heir, the emperor has her sterilized and exiled to Thriving Fortune, a remote country palace. At Thriving Fortune, Empress In-yo is isolated and under observation by her attendants, but she is eventually able to build a small communication network. In-yo secretly corresponds with her kin and allies in the north, hoping to overthrow the Emperor. Rabbit becomes lovers with Sukai, one of In-yo's fortune teller spies. In-yo stages

560-460: The reader discovers that in the foregoing narrative, the narrator had concealed or greatly misrepresented vital pieces of information. Such a twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted. Attempts have been made at

588-715: The reader's role in the perception of reliability and for relying on the insufficiently defined concept of the implied author. Nünning updates Booth's work with a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the reader's values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text. and offers "an update of Booth's model by making his implicit differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators explicit". Olson then argues "that these two types of narrators elicit different responses in readers and are best described using scales for fallibility and untrustworthiness." She proffers that all fictional texts that employ

SECTION 20

#1732787297012

616-463: The same time. Although there are many ways to understand this duality, I propose to analyze the four audiences which it generates." Similarly, Tamar Yacobi has proposed a model of five criteria ('integrating mechanisms') which determine if a narrator is unreliable. Instead of relying on the device of the implied author and a text-centered analysis of unreliable narration, Ansgar Nünning gives evidence that narrative unreliability can be reconceptualized in

644-455: The shores of Lake Michigan . She defines her sexuality as queer . Vo's first published short story was "Gift of Flight" in 2007, after which she published a number of short stories in various media. In 2020 Vo published the novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune , which won the Hugo Award for Best Novella and the 2021 IAFA Crawford Award . The book was also a finalist for the Locus and

672-432: The story. Reviewers have lauded the novel's female characters, the way in which women fight against their patriarchal society, and the "lyrical" and "haunting" prose. A reviewer from DVAN praised Vo for her evocative writing style and strong characterization, but felt that the worldbuilding and magic system were weak. Unreliable narrator In literature , film , and other such arts , an unreliable narrator

700-402: The truth, some of people who lie. Rabinowitz's main focus is the status of fictional discourse in opposition to factuality. He debates the issues of truth in fiction, bringing forward four types of audience who serve as receptors of any given literary work: Rabinowitz suggests that "In the proper reading of a novel, then, events which are portrayed must be treated as both 'true' and 'untrue' at

728-440: The world. In sum whether a narrator is called unreliable or not does not depend on the distance between the norms and values of the narrator and those of the implied author but between the distance that separates the narrator's view of the world from the reader's world-model and standards of normality. Unreliable narration in this view becomes purely a reader's strategy of making sense of a text, i.e., of reconciling discrepancies in

756-401: Was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction . James Phelan expands on Booth’s concept by offering the term “bonding unreliability” to describe situations in which the unreliable narration ultimately serves to approach the narrator to the work’s envisioned audience, creating a bonding communication between the implied author and this “authorial audience.” Sometimes

784-559: Was nominated for the 2021 Locus Award for Best Novella and won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novella . Publishers Weekly gave the novella a starred review, calling it a "masterfully told story... sure to impress". An NPR review called it "a remarkable accomplishment of storytelling", praising the way in which it amplifies the voices of women as well as queer characters, including the non-binary cleric Chih. The novella also received praise for its layered narrative structure, in which Chih, Rabbit, and In-yo all dole out different pieces of

#11988