‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’, uses metafiction and an unreliable narrator to discredit the reliability of text. The narrator’s own analysis of his text in his comment that we should not “imagine that those brackets are a confession of my humility” demonstrates the contingency of meaning and the difficulty of finding stable truths in a narrative. If the narrator is free to interpret his punctuation and motivation, so is the reader. Just as a reader of pre-Modernist fiction would typically trust a narrative voice, so would a student typically trust the voice of a lecturer. Following Mansfield, I explore the unreliable nature of all voices that claim authority. I used allegories to create figurative images, principally using light and darkness.When the narrator recalls how he “turns off the lights and smiles briefly”, the reader sees that he is content in darkness, marking the surfacing of the “dark passenger”. In the context of my story, this is a representation of our Id, the root of our malevolent actions.The most effective image of this comes at the end when the protagonist arrives at the woman’s house:“We got out of the car…engulfed by the darkness around me”. Here, the shifting pronouns from plural to singular show the character and his darker self coming together in unison. Symbolism is used to emphasize the nature of the darker self. As the man drives, he is aware of the streetlamps disappearing behind. The image of luminosity disappearing is symbolic of the character’s altruistic side fading.This is comparable to D.H. Lawrence’s use of allegory and symbolism regarding the mole in ‘Second Best’, where the killing of the mole is symbolic of Frances’s latent, aggressive sexuality and her repression of her feelings for Jimmy. Through her pent-up anger, she finds the courage to kill the mole, after her initial feeling of fear. The most prominent aspect of the narrator’s unreliability comes through the usage of switched pronouns. I wanted the reader
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