Fictional unreliable narrators — characters whose accounts cannot be fully trusted — are often described as a modernist invention, exemplified by works of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford. Critic Diane Lemoine pushes back. Earlier traditions, she argues — Augustine's Confessions, eighteenth-century epistolary novels, even some passages in Shakespeare — already deploy narrators whose self-presentations require skeptical reading. The modernist contribution, Lemoine suggests, was less to invent unreliability than to make it the central technical preoccupation.
Which choice best states the main idea of the text?
- Acheck_circle
Lemoine argues that unreliable narrators predate modernism, though modernism made the technique a central concern.
- B
Modernist writers invented unreliable narration.
- C
Augustine was a modernist.
- D
Unreliable narration is a flaw.
Explanation
The passage carefully separates invention (denied) from foregrounding (granted) — B. A is the view revised; C and D are unsupported.