SOURCE: Yacobi, Tamar. “Package Deals in Fictional Narrative: The Case of the Narrator's (Un)Reliability.” Narrative 9, no. 2 (May 2001): 223-29.

In the following essay, Yacobi compares the reliability of the narrator in “Gimpel the Fool” and William Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

The authors of Vanity Fair, The Brothers Karamazov, Don Quixote, or “The Overcoat”—to cite a few notable examples—partly divest their narrators of reliability, though leaving them as variously omniscient as George Eliot's. … Whatever logic or theology may lead us to expect, there are no package-deals in narration.

—Meir Sternberg, “Varieties of Omniscient Narration,” in Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction

As my epigraph points out, there are no package deals in narrative, least of all between surface forms or features and their effects. Instead, given the endless variability of context, the same form or formal pattern can always serve as means to different effects, and vice...