The Nexus of Unreliable Narration, Reader, Cognition and Truth in The Moonstone

Authors : Başak Çün

Pages : 1716-1731

Doi:10.29110/soylemdergi.1775745

View : 65 | Download : 287

Publication Date : 2025-12-28

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Positioned early in the list of modern English detective novels by T.S. Eliot, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) is a page-turner consisting of several narratives on the theft of a diamond. Collins declares in the Preface that the incidents told within the course of the novel grow out of the narrators’ motives in recounting what really happened. Then, the multiple narrative style clearly renders the accounts unreliable, precluding access to an essential version of truth and causing an interrogation of the novel’s epistemological basis. While acknowledging the structural merit Collins’ multiple narration adds to the detective fiction genre, this paper investigates the conflicting epistemology in the novel from the standpoint of cognitive narratology. Works by theorists such as David Herman, Alan Palmer, and James Phelan are referenced in the examination of the reader’s viewpoint in the reading experience. It does not do the text justice to seek unreliability in the novel’s narrative structure only- when tracking Collins’ assertion on the truthfulness of the narratives, adopting the concept of unreliability in cognitive narratology, and reading into the text with an awareness of the conceptual premises of the reader enables a “true” approach to the multiple narrative style. The reader is obliged to hold a central position in the process of knowledge-making; that is, the reader’s cognitive framework is in collaboration with the unreliable narratives during the resolution of the mystery.
Keywords : Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, hakikat, güvenilmez anlatı, biliş

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