This project argues that narrative analysis can be particularly beneficial to texts describing unique subjectivities or subjectivities not easily accounted for by mainstream culture. By looking at narration as an interpretive space and the way it manifests itself in American Literature, this project employs a few helpful concepts from Phelan's system of rhetorical narrative theory to look closely at texts that engage with the unreliability of character narrators to create unique subject positions and those that employ. It takes seriously the idea that the narrator is a unique and uniquely literary subject position as it manifests itself in three sites of American Literature from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If narration is also used to create a space for a subjectivity, then the acts of interpretation, evaluation, and reporting become fundamental also to one's identity. In this project, I will show how the analyzed texts depict identities that are somehow challenged along the lines of their ability to perform these same acts. Among other things, this will help illustrate how boundaries of identity can only be located by engagement and interaction with the surrounding space—that which is decidedly not identity.
