Double Heart

What distinguishes fiction from non-fiction in first-person narratives? What is the difference between a novel and autobiography? What makes a first-person narrative a literary work of art? If fiction is a self-contained meaning structure, what frame of reference can we use to tell if the narrator is «lying?» Using a phenomenological approach to these questions basic to both literary theory and practical literary criticism, Lucy L. Melbourne develops a model of the unreliable first-person narrative. By applying it to three challenging works, Saul Bellow's Dangling Man, Albert Camus's La Chute, and Franz Kafka's Ein Landarzt, she shows us how to read «between the lines» to discover the implicit text structuring first-person narratives into literary works of art.