From the perspective of an interest

From the perspective of an interest in embodiment, we might note that much of our evaluation of “dramatized” narrators—those narrators whose opinions or observations we are to recognize as at least somewhat at odds with those of the author—depends on corporeal clues. Often we think of our evaluation in terms of the narrator’s moral or intellectual qualities. Indeed, if we read narratology’s discussion of implied readers, we might well think that we recognize unreliability through rather abstract means. But the best-known examples of such narrators tend to be those in which the speaker is clearly embodied and positioned in a specific context. We might think, for example, of the nervous body attributed to Gilman’s narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper, probably the most commonly used story for introducing unreliable narration in the undergraduate classroom. Gilman’s narrator remarks,