论文总字数：55304字

摘 要

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Research background 1

1.2 Literature review 4

1.3 Need of the study 6

2. Phelan’s Theory on Unreliability 8

2.1 Classification 8

2.2 Development 9

2.3 Influences 10

3. Unreliability of Animal Narrative in A Dog’s Tale 12

3.1 Misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity 12

3.2 Underreporting of the discussion on optics and plants 14

3.3 Misinterpreting of the puppy’s death 16

3.4 Misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life 18

4. Conclusion 20

References 22

Acknowledgments

For the help and support that have facilitated the completion of this thesis, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to many people.

First, I am deeply indebted to Professor Hu Aihua who supervised me to complete this thesis. From the selection of the topic, review of narrative theories to textual analysis of the novel, she has offered me valuable suggestions and inspirations. She scrutinized my drafts patiently and gave me instructions that helped me out of the dead end. Without her continual guidance and inspirations, it would be impossible to have finished this thesis.

I am also grateful to all my teachers in the English department. During the undergraduate period, they not only taught me to improve my English proficiency but also introduced literature to me. It is their efforts that help me lay a solid foundation for this thesis.

Lastly, I want to thank my family for their company and support. They have given me strength to overcome difficulties and complete this thesis.

Abstract

During the development of narratology, unreliability has been an academically crucial topic under heated discussion at home and abroad. Mark Twain’s fiction A Dog’s Tale is featured by unreliable animal narrative, a less-interpreted topic in literary criticism. Within the framework of James Phelan’s theory on unreliability, this thesis studies unreliability of animal narrative in A Dog’s Tale in four aspects. Misinterpreting of Mr. Gray’s identity manifests itself in the erroneous information through both the animal narrator’s external focalization on Mr. Gray and internal focalization on the word “scientist”. Underreporting of the discussion on optics and plants arises from the contrast between external focalization and internal focalization. Misinterpreting of the puppy’s death occurs from the discrepancy between the animal narrator’s internal focalization and external focalization on the puppy during experimentation on the one hand and three discrepant perspectives on the puppy’s death on the other. Misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life reveals itself in the subjectivity of the animal narrator, contradictions within the narrative discourse, and four perspectives that reflect a tangled relationship between the animal narrator and the Grays. This thesis can offer a new perspective for the further interpretation of A Dog’s Tale, inspire further investigations on the animal narrative theory and serve as an example to put Phelan’s theory on unreliability into practice.

Keywords: A Dog’s Tale; unreliability; animal narrative; external focalization; internal focalization

中文摘要

在叙事学的发展过程中，不可靠性是一个重要话题，并引起了国内外学界的热议。马克·吐温的小说《狗的自述》以不可靠动物叙事为特征，不过未能引起学界关注。本文以詹姆斯·费伦的不可靠叙事理论为框架，从四个方面研究了《狗的自述》中动物叙事的不可靠性。首先，内外聚焦对格雷先生的身份报道存在误报现象。外聚焦体现出动物叙述者与格雷先生之间关系疏远，而与其他家庭成员关系亲密；内聚焦体现出动物叙述者本人及其母亲对“科学家”一词的内涵存在理解偏差。其次，内外聚焦之间的反差导致对光学和植物的相关报道不够充分。第三，内外聚焦导致动物叙述者在实验过程中对幼犬的处境存在误读现象；三种不同叙事视角对幼犬的死亡也存在误读现象。第四，对动物叙述者所过生活的误判体现出动物叙述者的叙述话语具有主观性和矛盾性。四种叙事视角也反映出动物叙述者与格雷一家人之间关系错综复杂。本文能够为进一步解读《狗的自述》提供新的研究视角，也能启发学界进一步研究动物叙事理论，并为费伦的不可靠叙事理论研究提供范例。

关键词：《狗的自述》；不可靠叙事；动物叙事；内聚焦；外聚焦

1. Introduction

1.1 Research background

As a discipline about theories of narrative, narratology can fall into classical narratology and postclassical narratology (Herman, 1999). Established on structuralism and influenced by formalism, classical narratology emerges in the 1960s and studies narrative as a self-contained system. After the 1990s, postclassical narratology springs up and combines narratology with other literary theories, thus generating rhetorical narratology, feminist narratology, cognitive narratology, etc. (Shen amp; Wang, 2010). Together, such theories contribute to understanding, analyzing, explaining and evaluating narratives.

Narrative is defined by Genette as “the representation of an event or a sequence of events” (1982:127). Summarizing the structuralist theory which holds that each narrative has two parts: story and discourse, Chatman (1978) describes the difference between story and discourse as the difference between content and expression. Story consists of events (actions and happenings) and existents (characters and items of settings) while discourse is the means by which those events and existents are communicated. Abbott (2008) explains that we can make many changes in the discourse but still deals with the same story. Discourse has been the focus of narratological investigations. In his Narrative Discourse (1972), Genette classifies discourse analysis into five aspects: order (events are narrated in a disrupted order), duration (how much space the narrative devotes to events that happen over short or long periods of time), frequency (the relationship between frequency of happening and frequency of being narrated), mood (the degrees of narrative information) and voice (the time of narrating, narrative levels and narrators). James Phelan, one of the founders of rhetorical narratology, proposes that “Narrative is not just story but also action, the telling of a story by someone to someone on some occasion for some purpose” (1996: 8).

A crucial concept in narratological investigations is unreliability, which has evolved from two terms. It is initiated by Wayne C. Booth as “unreliable narrator” and refined by James Phelan as “unreliable narration”. Currently, most theorists embrace the term “unreliability” and some of them put “narratorial” or “narrative” before it to emphasize its narratological sense. Unreliability has been defined by Shen Dan as “a feature of narratorial discourse”. Her definition goes on with “If narrator misreports, -interprets or -evaluates, or if she/he underreports, -interprets or -evaluates, this narrator is unreliable or untrustworthy” (2014: 896). The three verbs involved here are borrowed from Phelan’s types of unreliability included in his theory on what he calls unreliable narration. From Shen’s definition, we can see that unreliability is inextricably linked with the concepts of “unreliable narrator” and “unreliable narration”. We cannot understand unreliability without these two terms.

The term “unreliable narrator” is coined by Booth in Rhetoric of Fiction with his classical definition “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not” (1961:158-159). To understand the unreliable narrator requires knowledge of “the implied author”, a term also introduced by Booth in Rhetoric of Fiction, referring to the author’s second self which is distinct from the actual author. The implied author is the author’s image in the text, which is ethically superior to the flesh-and-blood author. The same actual author can create various kinds of second self when creating different works. Following Booth’s rhetorical approach, Phelan inherits the term the implied author as the standard to judge unreliability but he develops Booth’s theory on unreliability by adding another criterion “the authorial audience”, a term coined by P. J. Rabinowitz (1977) referring to the hypothetical audience which is distinguished from the actual audience. The authorial audience is created by the author’s assumptions about “his readers’ beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions” (1977: 126). An author will make his artistic choices based on these assumptions whose accuracy will decide his artistic success. Phelan refines Booth’s definition of unreliable narrator with “A homodiegetic narrator is unreliable when he or she offers an account of some event, person, thought, thing, or other object in the narrative world that deviates from the account the authorial audience infers the implied author would offer” (1999: 94). In other words, the narrator is unreliable “when he deviates from the account the authorial audience infers the implied author would offer” (1999: 94). Phelan regards unreliable narration as “a mode of indirect communication” which means “the implied author communicates with his or her audience by means of the voice of another speaker addressing another audience” (2007: 224). Phelan’s most significant theory, classification of unreliability will be left for discussion in the second chapter.

Studies on narrative unreliability are essentially divided into two schools: the rhetorical school and the cognitive school. According to Shen (2014), critics who adopt the rhetorical approach far outnumber those who take the cognitive one. The divergence of these two schools lies in the yardstick of gauging a narrator’s unreliability. The rhetorical school regards the implied author as the standard on which unreliability is determined and locates unreliability on the gap between the narrator and the implied author; conversely, the cognitive school, questioning the utility of the term implied author, takes the reader’s readings of the text as the criterion for determining unreliability and locates unreliability in the interaction between the text and its readers. Some theorists suggest a synthesis of concepts and ideas from the rhetorical and cognitive approaches (Nünning, 2005), while others hold that they are “essentially incompatible” and “any attempt to synthesize them is bound to favor one at the expense of the other” (Shen, amp; Xu, 2007: 54).

Mark Twain has been widely known as a great humanist and humorist; however, little-known is his facet as American early and prominent advocate for animal welfare (Fishkin, amp; Moser, 2010). Though much ink has been spilled on Twain’s best-known works on humans, the lesser-known ones, in which there are additional concerns for animals, are underappreciated. Among them is A Dog’s Tale (1903), one of Twain’s three polemical key pieces on animal welfare during the last decade of his life, the other two being his letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society and A Horse’s Tale (Fishkin amp; Moser, 2010). A Dog’s Tale focuses on the experiences of a dog named Aileen Mavourneen (hereafter referred to as “she” in this thesis) who gallantly rescues her master’s child from a burning cradle only to witness her puppy’s sacrifice for a medical experiment by her master. Apart from exposure to mistreatment of animals, the novel deserves attention for its unique narrative techniques. For one thing, the first-person narrator is surprisingly an animal, a domestic dog. She can understand human language; she also feels and thinks like a human being. For another, the narrative has a feature of unreliability as the animal narrator lacks human intelligence and sophistication, thus inevitably tricking readers in its discourse. The animal narrative and its unreliable feature necessitates the study of A Dog’s Tale with relevant narrative theories.

1.2 Literature review

The review includes two parts: previous studies on A Dog’s Tale and extant theories of animal narrative. Although published in 1903, A Dog’s Tale has not received due respect and drawn much research interest until recent years. However, thanks to the increasing weight of animal welfare and formalistic analysis, the novel has been rediscovered and examined as a valuable piece of literature. Generally speaking, the majority of the extant literature on A Dog’s Tale is foreign whereas domestic papers are scarce and only one of them is from an authorized university journal.

Previous studies on A Dog’s Tale consist of studies on the novel’s themes and studies on its form. Most scholars have focused on the themes of A Dog’s Tale. Taking an ecocritical approach, Marcus (2016) argues that it is one of the very few fictional works that condemn animal experiments by giving a firsthand account from the victim’s point of view. A broader perspective has been adopted by Guzman (2016) who concludes that Twain’s story reveals humans’ hypocritical relationship with animals labeled by humans as their friends. Different from Marcus and Guzman who focus on the narrator Aileen, Priya amp; Narayana (2018) show great interest in Aileen’s mother and hold that the novel explores enslavement as the mother dog symbolizes the white men who believe that African slaves are meek and ignorant enough to be oppressed. Studies on the novel’s themes have explored much possibility of Twain’s purposes, which provides reliable criteria for further interpretation of the novel. However, these scholars have their analysis based on Twain’s attitudes towards animal experiments, the human-animal relationship and enslavement. There is still much research space in the novel’s form, which also contributes to the thematic interpretation.

A few scholars have noticed its unique form: the story is told by an animal. Ali uses the term “anthropomorphism” to represent this form based on the definition that “anthropomorphism is an act of giving human characteristics to non-humans or objects” (2016: 69) and explains its functions. although he a pioneer in the novel’s form by introducing the fresh term anthropomorphism, Ali’s study remains narrow in that it only explains why Twain endows an animal with the abilities to talk, feel and think like human beings, instead of directly asking the question why Twain employs an animal as the narrator who plays a major role in communicating the story to audience.

It is noteworthy to point out that by introducing the two concepts “the author’s retreat” and “the implied author”, Zhang, Li amp; Zhen (2017) argue that narrator Aileen is designed by Twain to minimize his interference with storytelling so that events are refreshingly and objectively presented from her perspective and after the procession of her consciousness. The novel is indirect in a charming way because the implied author, instead of retreating from the story entirely, hides himself in the text and readers have to depend on themselves to grasp his intention. These three scholars succeed in explaining why Twain employs a dog narrator. Nevertheless, their claim is arbitrary to call Aileen a reliable narrator for the reason that she represents the value system and ethics of the implied author. It is questionable for two reasons. First, they have neglected the aspect of the narrator’s knowledge of facts and events. In fact, Aileen often knows less than readers. While readers are fully aware of what really happens, she is kept in the dark. Second, the narrator’s representation of the implied author’s values and ethics is questionable because there is a big gap between the clear-sighted and sophisticated implied author and the naïve dog who has insufficient knowledge of facts and events and lacks human sophistication. This thesis will question their claim of “reliable” by exploring Aileen’s unreliability in four aspects, that is, misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity, underreporting of the discussion on optics and plants, misinterpreting of the puppy’s death and misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life.

Extant theories of animal narrative are scarce and the related studies have only focused on the umbrella term that covers it. In their paper entitled The Stored Lives of Non-Human Narrators, Bernaerts, Caracciolo, Herman amp; Vervaeck (2014) examine the phenomenon of animal narrators under the superordinate nonhuman narrators and identify two crucial features of these narrators: character-narrators and integration of human and nonhuman traits. They also touch upon the functions, from a satiric strategy to foregrounding ethical problems. However, in their study, animal narrators are not treated as a narrative device distinct from object narrators and indefinable-entity narrators and there is no definite conclusion on this specific type. In the same vein, Alber (2016) classifies animal narrative as one type of unnatural narrative and discusses its functions on themes: mocking human folly or revealing human cruelty to animals. Together these studies have provided important insights into the animal narrative; however, there is little analysis on its unreliability.

As far as the deficiencies in the previous studies are concerned, first, scholars do not conduct analysis of unreliability of animal narrative and its significance in A Dog’s Tale. Second, existing theories of animal narrative do not provide insight into the aspect of unreliability and thereby cannot provide the theoretical framework for this analysis. Hence, this thesis attempts to explore unreliability of animal narrative and its significance in A Dog’s Tale by adopting theories of unreliability in narratology to provide a new perspective for the further study of this work.

1.3 Need of the study

This thesis has pedagogical, theoretical and practical implications. Pedagogically, by applying the theory of unreliability to analyze A Dog’s Tale, it will offer a new perspective to explore Twain’s works so that students of English-American Literature course can gain more profound understanding of Twain’s fictions and narrative techniques. Theoretically, through the combination of theories of unreliability with the analysis of animal narrative on which few canonized theories have been proposed yet, this thesis can enrich theories of animal narrative, especially about its features of unreliability, and further, offers a new example for practising the analysis of theories on unreliability in a specific text. Practically, with the exploration of the novel’s narrative feature and its contribution to the theme (human cruelty towards animals), this thesis will illuminate our perception of the relationship between humans and animals, the imbalance of which has led to the behavior of eating wild animals, triggering the outbreak of COVID-19, an epidemic which has claimed over three thousand lives in China since May 18, 2020. This thesis can help us to seek a better man-and-animal relationship.

2. Phelan’s Theory on Unreliability

This chapter introduces the theoretical framework of this thesis, Phelan’s theory on unreliability. Phelan’s classification of unreliability will be introduced and the relevant development and influences will be equally reviewed.

2.1 Classification

According to Phelan (1999, 2005), in telling a story a narrator plays three kinds of roles: reporter, evaluator and interpreter. A narrator may deviate from the implied author in his or her reporting, interpreting and evaluating, which generates the first classification: unreliable reporting along the axis of facts/events, unreliable interpreting on the axis of knowledge/perception and unreliable evaluating along the axis of ethics/evaluation. Moreover, Phelan includes activities of the authorial audience in his further classification. He holds that the authorial audience will perform two kinds of action once they decide the narrator’s account should not be taken for granted: “(1) they reject those words and, if possible, reconstruct a more satisfactory account; (2) they… accept what the narrator says but then supplement the account” (1999: 94; 2005: 50-51). In other words, degrees of unreliability can vary. As a result, a subdivision is made on unreliable reporting, unreliable interpreting and unreliable evaluating. For example, if the whole of a narrator’s reporting is rejected by the authorial audience, he or she is performing, in Phelan’s terms, misreporting. If the authorial audience accept part of the narrator’s reporting and supply the missing information, the narrator is underreporting.

Likewise, unreliable interpreting can be divided into misinterpreting and underinterpreting; unreliable evaluating can be divided into misevaluating and underevaluating. In the light of the narrator’s reports, interpretations and evaluations as well as readers’ two kinds of responses, six types of unreliability are identified: misreporting, underreporting, misinterpreting, underinterpreting, misevaluating and underevaluating. The difference between “mis-” and “under-” is essentially the difference between being wrong and being insufficient. Misreporting occurs when the narrator offers erroneous information opposed to the facts or events in the story because of his limited knowledge or purpose of concealing information. Underreporting occurs when the information offered by the narrator is less than he or she knows. Misinterpreting occurs when the narrator’s lack of knowledge, perceptiveness or sophistication yields a wrong interpretation of an event, situation or character. Underinterpreting occurs when the narrator yields an insufficient interpretation of those things. Misevaluating occurs when the narrator makes the wrong ethical judgment on an event or character due to mistaken values. Underevaluatingg occurs when the narrator’s ethical judgment moves along the right track but does not go far enough. Significantly, Phelan points out that one type of unreliability often occurs in combination with others.

2.2 Development

Although he successfully established six types of unreliability on two variables (1999, 2005): the axes on which unreliability occurs and the responses of the authorial audience, Phelan does not reveal the effects caused by these types at first. Later, the gap is filled. While most theorists talk of the ironic effects produced by unreliability, Phelan concentrates on the effects on interpretive, affective, and ethical relations between the narrator and the authorial audience. In order to account for these effects, Phelan (2007) elaborates his types of unreliability by drawing a distinction between estranging unreliability and bonding unreliability. In estranging unreliability, the authorial audience is estranged from the narrator because with the discrepancies between the narrator’s reports, evaluations or interpretations and the authorial audience’s own inferences on those things, the authorial audience will recognize that they will move far away from the implied author’s perspective if they follow the narrator’s. In bonding reliability, the distance between the narrator and the authorial audience is paradoxically reduced by their discrepancies because the unreliability includes communication endorsed by the implied author and the authorial audience. Any one of the six types of unreliability can function as estranging unreliability or bonding unreliability.

According to Phelan (2017), unreliability and reliability are not binary opposites. Therefore, it makes sense to develop a spectrum that runs from unreliability on the left end and reliability on the right. Then, he locates six types of unreliability along this spectrum. A left arrow is used by Phelan to indicate the direction of increasing unreliability. Misreporting/underreporting is placed at the far left, misevaluating/underevaluating less left and misinterpreting/underinterpreting least left. Reasons for such location are as follows:

First, since he views “somebody-telling-somebody-else-that-something-happened as fundamental to narrative” (2017: 98), Phelan also views that the author and the narrator’s divergence on what happened is more fundamental than their divergences on evaluations and interpretations about happenings. Second, misreporting is always accompanied by misevaluating and misinterpreting, thus magnifying the distance between the author and the narrator. Third, in Phelan’s view, ethical deficiencies are more significant than interpretive ones. Finally, Phelan considers misinterpreting as closer to restricted narration, one type of reliable narration identified by him.

2.3 Influence

Phelan’s six types of unreliability have a significant influence on narratological investigations about unreliability. Comparing Phelan’s types of unreliability with those distinguished by Riggan based on social parameters: picaro, clown, madman and naif, Nünning comments that Phelan’s classification is “not only much more systematic” but also “has the great merit of being based on a rhetorical model, focusing as it does on the relations among authorial agency, narrator and authorial audience” (2005: 94). Also influenced by Phelan’s types of unreliability, Shen defines that “If narrator misreports, -interprets or -evaluates, or if she/he underreports, -interprets or -evaluates, this narrator is unreliable or untrustworthy” (2014: 896).

Phelan’s six types of unreliability have been put into practice at home and abroad. First, Phelan has offered helpful concepts to describe unreliable narrative. For instance, Galvan (2006) employs the concept of misevaluating to explain the moral flaws in Latimer’s narration from George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. Linkin (2016) uses the term of bonding unreliability to describe effects generated by the narrator’s confessional memoir in paralipsis or omission in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Second, scholars have found value in applying Phelan’s types of unreliability to study phenomena of unusual narrative. For instance, He (2004) examines the course of a third-grade boy’s narrative with Phelan’s classification of reporting, interpreting and evaluating and concludes that unreliability of children narrative typically occurs on the axis of knowledge/perception. Chen (2007) studies A Madman’s Day and concludes that unreliability of madman narrative is often on the axis of knowledge/perception and manifests itself as misinterpreting and underinterpreting. Surprisingly, there has been little discussion on the phenomenon of animal narrative. As far as the author of this thesis knows, no scholar has applied Phelan’s types of unreliability to study animal narrative in A Dog’s Tale.

Hence, this thesis aims to interpret unreliability of animal narrative in Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale within the framework of Phelan’s theory. Four types of the animal narrator’s unreliability will be studied, including misreporting, underreporting, misinterpreting and misevaluating. Their effects on the plot, characterization and themes of this novel will also be analyzed.

3. Unreliability of Animal Narrative in A Dog’s Tale

A Dog’s Tale employs a homodiegetic narrator called Aileen, a pet dog at the Grays. Adopting Phelan’s theory of unreliability, this chapter will study different types of the animal narrator’s unreliability, that is, misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity, underreporting of the discussion on optics and plant, misinterpreting of the puppy’s death and misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life, and their relevant functions in the story.

3.1 Misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity

Unreliability on the axis of events/facts is concerned with the narrator’s role as a reporter of events and facts. The narrator may supply erroneous or insufficient information on events, facts or characters. The authorial audience must notice falseness or inadequacy of the information supplied by the narrator. Otherwise, they will move far away from the implied author. A Dog’s Tale is typical of two subtypes: misreporting and underreporting. According to Phelan (2005), misreporting occurs when the narrator supplies erroneous information opposed to the facts in the story due to limited knowledge. In A Dog’s Tale, misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity (a renowned scientist) occurs in two respects of animal narration.

Misreporting first occurs from the first-person animal narrator Aileen’s external focalization on his focalized object Mr. Gray. External focalization corresponds to Todorov’s formula “Narrator lt; Character (the narrator says less than the character knows)” (1980:189). The narrator only observes the environment, events, appearances and behaviors of the characters and is unable to enter the character’s inner world. “Auburn tails”, “hugging me” and “quick in his movements” are the animal narrator’s observation of Mr. Gray and his family members. According to Hu (2004), external focalization renders characters mysterious and blurred because it provides no access to their psychological activities. Therefore, it is difficult to figure out Mr. Gray’s identity merely by the narrator’s external focalization. Besides, there is a discrepancy between this dog narrator’s and his family members’ accounts of Mr. Gray. In the narrator’s depictions of the mistress Mrs. Gray and the daughter Sadie, complementary adjectives like “sweet”, “lovely” and “darling” are used, which shows the animal narrator’s affection for and intimacy with them. In comparison, when describing Mr. Gray, the animal narrator merely employs neutral words “business-like”, “unsentimental” and “prompt”, which imparts a strong sense of distance from and lacks intimate contacts with him. This discrepancy shows that the narrator has a biased attitude towards Mr. Gray. Since the animal narrator’s impression on Mr. Gray seems to be manipulated by her biased attitude that may affect her fair judgment, the supplied information on Mr. Gray must be erroneous.

The animal narrator’s internal focalization results in the second misreporting, which includes two different perspectives on the word “scientist”: the animal narrator’s own perspective and her mother’s perspective. Internal focalization can be represented by the formula “Narrator=Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows)” (Genette, 1980: 192). It shows what a character sees, knows and feels. “I do not know” and “my mother would know” presents the psychological activities of the dog narrator and her mother, which is typical of internal focalization. According to Rimmon-Kenan (1983), the knowledge of an internal focalizer is restricted. From “I do not know what the word (scientist) means” (Twain, 2011: 16), the animal narrator confesses that she does not comprehend the meaning of the word “scientist”. It indicates that she is incapable of confirming what she hears about Mr. Gray due to limited knowledge on the word “scientist”, which echoes Phelan’s proposal that “misreporting is typically a consequence of the narrator’s lack of knowledge” (1999: 95). The narrator merely records and repeats what she hears about Mr. Gray’s identity and narrates information to readers without thinking or judgement. The other is Aileen’s mother’s perspective. She would know how to use the word “scientist” to “get effects” like “depressing a rat-terrier” and “making a lap-dog look sorry he came” (Twain, 2011: 16), which employs metalepsis, meaning “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse” (Genette, 1980: 234-231). In first-person narration, metalepsis is typically represented by intrusion of the omniscient perspective (Shen, 2004). The first-person dog narrator penetrates into her mother’s psyche and notices her emotional responses to the “lap dog” and the “rat-terrier”. From Aileen’s mother’s perspective, the word “scientist” is used to overwhelm others, which is against the fact that it is used to address a person who devotes himself to scientific research and has acquired amounts of professional knowledge. Just as what Phelan remarks about misreporting, this animal narrator supplies erroneous information about Mr. Gray’s identity as a famous scientist.

To conclude, the animal narrative of Mr. Gray’s identity is misreporting-oriented. The significance of this misreporting can enrich the image of Mr. Gray who embodies complexity and hypocrisy of human beings and who cannot be easily seen through or solely trusted from the animal narration.

3.2 Underreporting of the discussion on optics and plants

Phelan (2005) puts forward that underreporting occurs when the narrator offers insufficient or limited information about facts, events or characters because of lacking knowledge or deliberately concealing information. In A Dog’s Tale, the animal narrator underreports Mr. Gray and his associates’ discussion in the laboratory and her underreporting occurs from two topics involved: optics and plants.

Underreporting first occurs from animal narration on the topic optics, which involves both external and internal focalization. On one hand, “they discussed optics” and “as they called it” are the animal narrator’s observation of events in the auditory sense, which signals external focalization on optics. The external focalizor gives information about optics from the perspective of Mr. Gray and his associates. Both “they could not agree” and “must test it by experiment” indicate that they are very interested in optics, wanting to deepen the optical issue as to whether injury to a certain part of brain will cause blindness. On the other hand, “I didn't care for the optics” is the dog narrator’s psychological activity, which is internal focalization on optics. From the dog narrator’s perspective, optics is “dull” and “bore[s]” her. She even goes to “sleep” when the discussion proceeds. According to Rimmon-Kenan (1983), the ideological fact of focalization refers to the focalizer’s conceptual view towards the focalized. The narrator-focalizer’s ideology is dominant and authoritative whereas other ideologies in texts are subordinate. In this sense, the dog narrator’s internal focalization provides the authoritative view on optics: “dull and boring”, whereas Mr. Gray’s and his associates’ views are subordinate. Put differently, the author holds negativity towards Mr. Gray’s interest in optics, which therefore lays down the basis for the later cruel animal experiment. The animal narrator shows indifference towards optics about which Mr. Gray and his associates are deeply concerned, which is suggestive that the information about the discussion on optics she provides must be insufficient.

Animal narration on the topic plants equally causes underreporting. The dog narrator offers little information from the perspective of Mr. Gray and his associates, for external focalization on plants is very limited. It only appears in one clause “and next they discussed plants”, followed by “and that interested me because…”. and then it gives way to internal focalization. When studying the psychological facet of focalization dealing with the focalizer’s mind and emotion (2002), Rimmon-Kenan argues that internal focalizer has restricted knowledge and is subjective. The exclamation “It was a wonder how that could happen” (Twain, 2011: 31) for the common phenomenon of the growth from seeds to flowers and the complacent tone of “how much I knew” reflect that dog narrator’s knowledge about plants is rather limited and echoes Phelan’s argument that underreporting can be caused for lack of knowledge (2005). The subjunctive mood in “I wished I could” and “I would have” further displays a high degree of the narrator’s subjectivity. Therefore, the animal narrator’s restricted knowledge and subjectivity on the topic “plants” causes the supplied information to be limited.

It is thus concluded that the animal narrator underreports the discussion of Mr. Gray and his associates in the laboratory. Its significance is to create suspense because the topics optics and plants, on which information is withhold, are closely related to the later event of the animal experiment.

3.3 Misinterpreting of the puppy’s death

Unreliability on the axis of knowledge/perception is concerned with the narrator’s role as interpreter of events, characters or situations. The narrator’s interpretation on these issues can be totally or partially wrong. Readers must recognize deficiencies of the narrator’s understanding to stay close to the implied author’s intention. One subtype misinterpreting deserves our elaboration. According to Phelan (2005), misinterpreting occurs when the narrator offers a wrong interpretation of an event, situation or character for lack of knowledge, perceptiveness or sophistication. The misinterpreting of the puppy’s situation occurs from two discrepant kinds of animal narration.

The first discrepancy is between the animal narrator’s external and internal focalization on the puppy. “The external/internal opposition yields objective (neutral, uninvolved) v. subjective (colored, involved) focalization” (Rimmon-Kenan, 2002: 82). Before the experiment, the puppy was taken to the laboratory by Mr. Gray and his friends. The dog narrator feels “proud” of this, which signals internal focalization. From the narrator’s perspective, it is “a pleasure” that the puppy wins attention from these people. Both words “proud” and “pleasure” reflect the narrator’s emotions, a sign of subjectivity. “Of course” indicates that she has no suspect of Mr. Gray’s intent on her puppy. Her sense of certainty also proves that internal focalization is subjective. All these show that the narrator is close to and unwary of humans. During the experiment, the dog narrator gives external focalization on the puppy. The narartor only observes the puppy’s actions and appearance and there is no inference of her own emotions, which makes her focalization objective. Vivid verbs like “shrieked”, “staggering around”, “lay”, “whimpering” and “dropped down”, the aghast appearance in the “head all bloody” and lifeless state “it was still”, all these depictions reflect the agony and miserableness the puppy experiences during the experiment, which reveals cruelty and maltreatment towards animals. This discrepancy between the subjective internal focalization and the objective external focalization shows that the unsuspecting animal narrator has wrong interpretation of the puppy’s dangerous and miserable situation during Mr. Gray’s animal experiment, if we borrow Phelan’s definition of misinterpreting.

Animal narration provides three perspectives on the puppy’s death, which causes the second discrepancy. Niederhoff defines perspective as “the way the representation of the story is influenced by the position, personality and values of the narrator, the characters and, possibly, other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld” (2014: 692). A narrator may tell a story from his own perspective or the perspective of a character. In the narration of the puppy’s death, the dog narrator first adopts Mr. Gray’s perspective. After the experiment, he stops discussing with his associates for a moment, orders the footman to dispose the puppy’s body by “burying it in the far corner of the garden” (Twain: 2011: 34) and goes on with his discussion afterwards. He uses the puppy’s body as garden fertilizer after killing it in his experiment. From Mr. Gray’s perspective, the puppy’s death is insignificant and causes no uneasiness because of his position as the experimenter and indifference and cruelty towards animals.

The second perspective is the footman’s. Upon Mr. Gray’s order, the footman buries the puppy under a great elm with “tears in his eyes”, a sign of his sadness for the loss of the puppy’s life. In pastoral poetry, the shade of elms means a special place of peace. He hopes that the puppy can enjoy tranquility after death. From the footman’s perspective, the puppy’s death is mournful because he shows sympathy for and concern with the animal. Mr. Gray is superior to the footman for his higher social status as a “renowned scientist” and higher education marked by his “frosty intellectuality”. The dog narrator is thereby attentive to Mr. Gray’s indifferent attitude while neglecting the footman’s quiet sorrow. Consequently, she is unaware of the puppy’s misery. The narrator’s neglect of the footman’s emotions confirms Phelan’s analysis as to what causes misinterpreting (2005).

The animal narrator offers her own perspective of the victimized puppy, a third perspective. The narrator follows the footman to the garden and sees his action of digging a hole and covering the puppy up cautiously. Impressed by Mr. Gray’s previous discussion on plants, she mistakes the footman’s action of burying the dead puppy for planting seeds. Such depictions as “plant the puppy”, “it would grow” and “come up a fine handsome dog” (Twain, 2011:35) are her romantic imagination that the puppy will come back and have a wonderful life, which is set in contrast with the harsh reality that her beloved puppy is lost for ever. Upon the puppy’s death, Mr. Gray shows callousness and disregard, the footman expresses regret and sympathy and the dog narrator is unaware of the truth but immersed in her fake imagination. The discrepancy of the aforementioned three perspectives shows that the animal narrator has wrong interpretation of the puppy’s death during the cruel animal experiment.

To sum up, the animal narrator misinterprets the puppy’s situation during and after Mr. Gray’s experiment. The use of misinterpreting reveals the theme of animal welfare. Animals are susceptible to cruelty, mistreatment, and even at the sacrifice of life just as what happens to the miserable puppy. The puppy’s suffering and death inflicted by Mr. Gray foreground the controversial issue of using animals for scientific or medical experimentation. As an animal welfare advocate of his era, Twain is strongly against the practice of experimentation on live animals. By arranging this misinterpreting, he strongly condemns unscrupulous mistreatment of animals in the name of science.

3.4 Misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life

Unreliability on the axis of ethics and evaluation is concerned with the narrator’s role as an evaluator of events, situations or characters. The narrator’s evaluation may be wrong or does not go far enough. In A Dog’s Tale, there exists a fourth subtype: misevaluating. Phelan (2005) put forwards that misevaluating occurs when the narrator makes wrong judgment on an event or character due to incorrect values. Misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life in the Gray’s family occurs in animal narration as follows: “So, as you see, mine was a pleasant life. There could not be a happier dog that I was” (Twain, 2011: 37). She believes she leads a happy life, which, as a matter of fact, is her misevaluation.

First, the animal narrator is subjective, which confirms narrative unreliability. By “as you see”, the animal narrator talks directly to the addressees and is eager to win their approval, which is a sign of her own subjectivity. The structure “could not be happier” expresses stressed affirmation and further testifies to her subjectivity. Therefore, the narrator’s evaluation of her life may turn out to be inauthentic.

The second proof of misevaluating is internal contradictions within the animal narrator’s narrative discourse. The statement “mine was a pleasant life” contradicts with “I woke in an awful fright” after she is furiously beaten by Mr. Gray. When the narrator flees to hide herself, derogatory nouns “terror”, “fears” and “despair”, adjectives “helpless”, “afraid” and “dreadful” as well as expressions “hardly even whimpered” and “froze me”, all pinpoint the narrator’s psychological sufferings inflicted by Mr. Gary, which contradicts her statement of leading a happy life.

Animal narration provides four different perspectives to reflect the complicated relationship between the animal narrator and the entire household, which is the third proof of the narrator’s misevaluating of her happy life. The first is Mrs. Gray’s perspective. She “gently” uses the dog narrator for a foot-stool, thinking “it was a caress”. Although the two words “gently” and “caress” show her affection for and kindness to the narrator, the compound word “foot-stool” represents a relation of exploitation and oppression between her and the animal. The second is a child’s perspective. Mrs. Gray’s child is “fond of” the narrator but likes to haul on her tail. The expression “never could get enough” shows his “hauling” is frequent and continuous. In this sense, the animal narrator is a toy in his hand rather than a creature that should be treated equally. Never has he considered the possible pain caused by his strong pulling of the animal narrator. The third perspective is Mr. Gray’s. He addresses the narrator as “the beast” and “this poor silly quadruped”, which mirrors his despise of a lower creature. When the brave narrator drags her master’s child from the fire, the only thing inferred by Mr. Gray is that “the dog had gone mad and was destroying the child” (Twain, 2011: 30), which reveals his hostility towards the dog narrator. The last perspective is the footman’s. After the narrator’s beloved puppy is killed by Mr. Gray for experimentation, the footman says, “Poor little doggie, you saved his child” (Twain, 2011:). The pronoun “his” proves that the footman dare not make mention of his master Mr. Gray although resenting his ungratefulness and cruelty to the narrator. He is sympathetic towards her but too powerless to help her. All these perspectives reflect the animal narrator’s complicated relationship with the Grays: She gets both affection and exploitation from Mrs. Gray and her child, contempt and cruelty from Mr. Gray, sympathy and no practical help from the footman. As an animal, the narrator is not sophisticated enough to understand this tangled relationship, which echoes Phelan’s proposal that lack of sophistication can cause misevaluating (2005). The animal narrator thus makes a wrong judgment that her life is pleasant.

To conclude, the animal narrator misevaluates her life at the Grays. It is apparent that misevaluating is ironic of the animal-human relation. Animals do not live a happy life in households because they can be used as objects and mistreated by unkind masters. Man’s relationship with animals is anthropomorphic and subjective just as Mrs. Gray thinks it is a caress when she uses the narrator as a foot-stool. We should have objective assessment of animals’ life quality. Sympathy along with practical help is needed to improve the living conditions of animals while an unreasonable contempt for and hostile attitude toward animals should be removed.

4. Conclusion

This thesis elaborates within the framework of James Phelan’s theory unreliability of animal narrative in four aspects that occurs in A Dog’s Tale, including misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity, underreporting of the discussion on optics and plants, misinterpreting of the puppy’s death and misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life.

Misreporting of Mr. Gray’s identity is found in both external focalization on Mr. Gray and internal focalization on the word “scientist”. External focalization on Mr. Gray that only employs neutral words is in set in contrast with that on other characters who uses quite a few commendatory words. This contrast imparts a strong sense of distance between the animal narrator and Mr. Gray as well as her biased attitude towards Mr. Gray, which, therefore, renders the relevant information unfair and erroneous. On the contrary, internal focalization provides two perspectives on the word “scientist”: incomprehension of the word “scientist” from the perspective of the animal narrator; information against the factual meaning of the “scientist” from her mother’s perspective. All these prove the narration of Mr. Gray who is a renowned scientist is misreporting.

Underreporting is studied by respectively examining external and internal focalization on optics and plants. External focalization that reflects a keen interest in optics from the perspective of Mr. Gray and his associates is set in contrast with internal focalization that manifests indifference towards optics from the narrator’s perspective. This contrast is suggestive that the supplied information is insufficient due to the narrator’s indifferent and careless attitude towards optics. Concerning the topic of “plants”, external focalization supplies little information from the perspective of Mr. Gray and his friends. On the contrary, internal focalization reveals the narrator’s limited knowledge about “plants” and subjectivity, thus causing the information to be limited and unreliable.

Misinterpreting of the puppy’s death is interpreted based on two discrepancies in animal narration. The first discrepancy is between the narrator’s internal focalization that expresses a sense of pride for the puppy and unawareness of danger when it is taken away to the laboratory, and external focalization that depicts the terrible torture and agony experienced by the puppy when it is experimented on. The second discrepancy is among three perspectives on the puppy’s death: callousness of Mr. Gray, sympathy of the footman and unawareness of the animal narrator.

Misevaluating of the animal narrator’s life is studied in three aspects. First, the narrator displays a high degree of subjectivity when evaluating her life as happy. Second, derogatory words and expressions in the narrator’s depiction of her psychology contradict the evaluation that she has a happy life. Third, four perspectives are provided to reflect a tangled relationship between the animal narrator and the Grays: she is adored and exploited by Mrs. Gray and her child, despised and mistreated by Mr. Gray, and helplessly pitied by the footman. In this complicated relationship, the narrator is unlikely to lead a happy life.

In terms of significance, theoretically, this thesis can enrich the theory on animal narrative and offer a new case study for applying Phelan’s theory to literary criticism. Pedagogically, it can help students who major in English-American Literature learn more about narrative features of Twain’s works. Practically, by studying unreliable animal narrative that helps to reveal human cruelty towards animals and animals’ pathetic and helpless life in the human house, it is hoped to arouse people’s attention on the relationship between man and animals and help them seek a more harmonious relationship with animals.

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