真相与谎言之间：《法国中尉的女人》嵌入叙事的不可靠性研究

Between Truth and Lies: A Study of Unreliable Narration in the Embedded Narrative of The French Lieutenant’s Woman

摘要: 约翰·福尔斯的《法国中尉的女人》构建了双层叙事结构：框架叙事由限制性全知叙述者讲述查尔斯与萨拉的情感纠葛，嵌入叙事则由萨拉亲口讲述她与法国中尉的往事。萨拉的嵌入叙事在价值判断与核心事实两个维度上均呈现出显著的不可靠性，其语体风格的内在矛盾构成这一不可靠性的叙事标记。文章借助布思的不可靠叙事理论与费伦的三轴分析框架，考察这一不可靠叙事的生成机制及其修辞功能。研究发现，萨拉的不可靠叙事是一套有意为之的叙事策略：她以表演性的受难叙事姿态引导查尔斯的情感与行为，最终为自己争取到逃离的可能。这一策略折射出维多利亚时代女性在话语规约下以叙事谋求主体能动性的困境，也体现了福尔斯借叙事分层与多重结局解构单一价值判断的后现代叙事意图。

Abstract: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman constructs a two-tiered narrative structure: the matrix narrative, delivered by a selectively omniscient narrator, traces the emotional entanglement between Charles and Sarah, while the embedded narrative consists of Sarah’s own account of her past involvement with the French Lieutenant. Sarah’s embedded narrative exhibits marked unreliability along two axes—the axis of value judgment and the axis of narrative fact—and the internal contradictions in her rhetorical register serve as the textual markers through which this unreliability is signaled. Drawing on Wayne Booth’s theory of unreliable narration and James Phelan’s three-axis framework, this paper examines the generative mechanisms of Sarah’s unreliable narration and its rhetorical functions across different levels of reader response. The analysis suggests that Sarah’s unreliable narration constitutes a deliberate narrative strategy: by performing the posture of a suffering woman, she shapes Charles’s emotions and conduct, ultimately securing the conditions for her own escape. This strategy illuminates the predicament of Victorian women, who were compelled to negotiate narrative agency within a system of discursive constraints, and reflects Fowles’s postmodern intent to resist singular moral judgment through narrative layering and multiple endings.