5.1 Social Identity7

  5.2 Personal Characteristic.8

  5.3 Personal Pursuance.8

6. Conclusion.9

7. Reference..10

1.Introduction

Moon and Sixpence is one of the masterpieces of William Somerset Maugham. While enjoying the novel, most of the readers would pay more attention to the theme and the plots of this novel, like how Charles Strickland overcomes all the difficulties and becomes an excellent painter. Yet the person who give us all the information about the main characters in the novel is the narrator. When it comes to the narrative, readers would take this part of the novel as the voice from the author, thus usually trusting it without other concerns. Yet, the narrator is not simply a story-teller who is plays an important role in the story and tells the story in his own perspective which means that his understandings and thoughts might differ from the author or the reality. That’s why readers need to pay attention to the narrative in the story and pause for a second thought about its reliability.

And the reliability of the narrative mainly depends on the characters in novels. First of all, the relationship among the narrator, narrative and the author should be clarified. Then the main demonstration of unreliable narrative in the novel Moon and Sixpence will be displayed below.

2.Narrator

   2.1 The definition of narrators

 Basically, narrative is closely associated with the narrator. And the narrator is not simply a story-teller who plays an important role in the story but also tells the story in his own perspective which means that his understandings and thoughts might differ from the author or the reality. Some scholars(王治明,李昺,1991)believe that the narrative perspective is decided by the attitude of the narrator who has both objective and subjective sides. Therefore the same narrator might give readers at least two versions of stories depending on whether his objective side surpasses subjective side or the other way round. The perspective of the narrator would affect the outcome of the story to a certain degree which readers cannot predict. Sometimes the narrator would provide readers with wrong information when he wants to protect his own profit and keep the truth away from the readers. Not all of the narrator is honest, nor is all of the narrative is reliable.That’s why readers need to pay extra attention to the narrative in the story and pause when it needs to be reconsidered its reliability.

   2.2 The classification of narrators

    In order to clarify the reliability of the narrative, readers need to be aware of the levels of narrators, which has been studied from home and abroad. One scholar from China, ZU Guosong(2002), claims that, in a specific text, there are two basic levels of narrators, text narrator and story narrator. The former is the most powerful narrator in a novel where one can not only narrate the whole story but also can organize the text. He thinks that the text narrator speaks for all the characters in the novel and only exists in the imaginary world in the novel. The latter usually appears in the narration in the text with a specific name, who not only forms a part of the story but also plays an important role in the text. ZU perceives that the narrative out of the story narrator forms a gap from what comes out of the text narrator and this distance adds a sense of reliability to the imaginary world. When it comes to the narrator in Moon and Sixpence, “I” as the story’s main story narrator plays a significant role in telling us the most of the story of Charles Strickland by recollection of his own and other narrators like Dirk Stroeve and Mrs Strickland. More specifically, the author combines the story of Charles with other characters’ perfectly by creating different levels of narrators to carve a scattered life story of Charles Strickland. In other word, according to ZU, at least three levels narrators appeared in Moon and Sixpence, namely the text narrator “I”, the story narrator “I”who is a friend of Charles Strickland, and other sub-story narrators who knows a small part of Charles’ life experience. Therefore, the knowledge whether true or not about Charles collected from three levels of narrators forms part of Charles’s story, leaving the rest of the story uncompleted, which makes the whole story seems not imaginary but truly happened in another corner of the world. The clarification of narrators can help readers to better understand the levels of the story therefore to distinguish unreliable narrative from the massive narrative.