‘I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning’: Unintentional unreliable narration in digital fiction

Abstract

This article offers comparative close readings of two digital fictions that feature various types and degrees of unintentional unreliable narration. Its prime focus lies on the affordances and restraints provided by hypertextual, multilinear, multimodal, interactive and ludic new media with respect to the aesthetic representation and textual embedding of unreliability. To this end, I have chosen narratives from two ‘generations’ of digital fiction – a hyperfiction par excellence, and a hypermedia narrative, both of which are multilinear by definition yet deal with the ideas of closure and narrative framing in very different ways. In particular, I shall examine how unintentional, psycho-pathological unreliability in the sense of Riggan’s (1981; cf. Heyd, 2006; Jahn, 1998) ‘madman’ are represented in afternoon, a story (Joyce, 1987) and the German hypermedia novel Quadrego (Maskiewicz, 2001). My comparative analysis shows how manifestations of deviant yet not devious, in the sense of quietly deceptive narration, are aesthetically enriched by techniques afforded by the digital medium, such as hypertextual multilinearity, lack of or partial closure, multisensory experience, fluid transitions and boundaries and, most significantly, the play with reader agency, which may – in cases of radical multilinearity – even lead to readerly unreliability.