Narration Through the Lens of Disinformation: The Impact of Unreliable Narrators

Disinformation, over the course of recent years, has become a point of focus in social and political research spheres to discuss how information can be weaponized against governments and populations alike. In conjunction with the current literature disinformation studies (i.e news, media), literary works (i.e short stories, novels) can contribute to the wider understanding of the relatively new field. The bridge between the two disciplines exists within a subsection of literary theories regarding narration. The study of unreliable narration in prose fiction provides a set of interdisciplinary theories that can explain disinformation, or intentionally false and misleading narratives, in twenty-first century media. This paper analyzes the unreliable narration in Alexander Pushkin\u27s short story, Queen of Spades (1834), to test the hypothesis that unreliable narration operates in ways that can predict some of the patterns of disinformation in the twenty-first century media. Through an analysis of the in-text behavior of characters as they are affected by narration, a theoretical framework that links these characters to real-life readers can be established. As a result of this analysis, I articulate some of the potential theoretical insights that literary theories of unreliable narration can bring to the emerging field of Disinformation Studies.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2022/1125/thumbnail.jp