The “Truth” of Untruth: Exploring Unreliable Narration in Contemporary Autofiction
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Authors
Sutton, Eric Keith
Issue Date
2024-05-30
Type
Language
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Abstract
This paper examines works by contemporary autofiction writers Karl Ove Knausgaard,
Claire-Louise Bennett, Rachel Cusk, and W.G. Sebald for craft techniques that posit unreliable
narrative storytelling. Through metaphor, aside, interjection, shifting points of view, metafiction,
and mythmaking, among other techniques, these writers admit to the fiction of their autofictional
truths, which I argue reveals a new, enlightened form of truth that occupies the marginalia
between fact and fiction. Admission to “untruth” – whether through figurative metaphor or overt
metafiction – opens the reader to a compassionate truth that accounts for our flaws and foibles.
Thus, as readers, we become participants in the generative fiction of their supposed truth-writing,
engendering a freeing and universal reading experience. Engaging both classical and
contemporary autofiction scholarship, I will prove that studying autofiction exceeds the
fact/fiction dichotomy and brings readers into a liminal space – one that these writers mine for
inherent self-truths – wherein we can discover similar meaning in our own lives and in the world
around us. Unreliable narration, therefore, presents a paradox whereby admission to untruths
enables acquisition of truths that exist beyond mere recollection of factual events.