American Realism

Complex Characters in Realism

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4 English 11 American Realism new

Complex characters in realist literature, like real people, react to events in unpredictable ways.
Their behavior reveals multiple motives and conflicting traits, and it evolves with time.
Realist characters are more believable because of these qualities.
Mrs. Mallard -

In this lesson, you will evaluate how authors use unreliable narrators and other literary techniques for effect in realist literature.

When reading a story, audiences expect to be able to trust the narrator and the events that the narrator describes. .
Sometimes, though, narrators have an unreliable or untrustworthy perspective on the events in a story.
This limitation creates an unreliable narrator, or a narrator whose story cannot be believed.
In that case, readers must judge for themselves which parts of the narrative are true and which should be called into doubt.
The two main reasons that readers might doubt a narrator's credibility are a lack of sophistication and a lack of sanity.

In a story with an unsophisticated narrator, the first-person account often comes from a child's point of view.
An example of an unsophisticated narrator comes from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Told from the point of view of a young girl, Scout, living in a small town in the 1930s, the story focuses on racial tensions in the community.
The narrator does not understand why race is such a contentious, or controversial, issue.

Narrators who display a lack of sanity are also considered unreliable because readers cannot be sure which events actually take place and which occur only in the narrator's imagination.
Recall the excerpt from Poe's "The Black Cat.” Is the mark on the cat's chest actually growing, or is the change happening only in the narrator’s mind?
Readers, recognizing that the narrator has shown signs of insanity, must decide for themselves if the action is truly taking place.

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