The Knight as Story-Teller

Abstract

In shaping their stories authors frequently adopt the perspective of one or another of their characters, so that we see events through the eyes of those characters and, while we are reading, adopt their values — even though they may not coincide completely with our own (Jane Austen is a good example of a writer who tells her stories from the perspective of her heroines). Sometimes authors use a first person narrative where we hear the story from the mouth of a character who may or may not be a reliable judge (Lockwood in Wuthering Heights is a narrator whom we obviously cannot trust). In this kind of case we may be at least as much preoccupied with the character telling the story as with the actual events he recounts.