The Syntax of Unreliable Narrators’ I-Utterances in ‘Gone Girl’ by G. Flynn

Unreliable narration research raises the problem of truthful information presented in fiction, which is for the most part made up. However, the truth in the fictional world is what the reader believes to be true. Therefore, deliberate deluding or confusing the reader by an untrustworthy character creates an additional fictional layer consisting of false facts. This represents the contradiction between the imaginary and the fake, the latter being untrue in terms of fiction. The paper examines how the author of the best-selling novel Gone Girl realizes her intention of deceiving or misleading the readers on the syntactic level of speech of the two main characters who are unreliable narrators. The analysis of sentence structure variety, average sentence length and syntactic stylistic peculiarities of I-utterances aims at ascertaining whether these devices and their frequency indicate that the author gives the readers a hint at the unreliability of the narration. Sentence complexity and types of clauses in composite sentences are also taken into consideration as possible signs of unreliability. As one main character is male and the other is female, the quantitative analysis of syntactic features is carried out separately to detect gender differences.