Claims of Stable Identity and (Un)reliability in Dissonant Narration

Abstract Self-conscious character narration provides special opportunities for authors to signal (un)reliability. This article focuses on one such opportunity. When narrators like John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier consistently assert moral and cognitive distance from their existences as characters in a story world, they create a pattern that Dorrit Cohn calls dissonant narration. But otherwise dis-sonant narrators close this distance and deviate from their pattern if they link a char-acter trait to both their narrating- and their experiencing-self, thereby asserting that their claimed character trait is temporally continuous. I refer to these kinds of excep-tions within dissonant narration as claims of stable identity and argue for their impor-tance for judgments of (un)reliable narration. After defining the concept in relation to contemporary models of unreliability, the article analyzes particular claims of stable identity made by John Dowell and other narrators to show that authors can use them in different ways to guide readers ’ understandings in character narration. Claims of Stable Identity In Transparent Minds (1978), her classic study of how authors present con-sciousness in narrative fiction, Dorrit Cohn devotes the fourth chapter to the techniques of retrospective character (“figural”) narration. In that chapter, she makes a valuable distinction between “consonant ” narrators, who morally and intellectually identify with their former selves, and “dis-sonant ” narrators, who claim moral and intellectual distance from their former selves by offering a contrasting and supposedly superior set o