The Hunting Wives

Because the use of first-person narration provides intimate access to a specific character’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, this literary technique is often employed to twist and warp the novel’s vision of reality. Whenever this particular narrative structure is used, there is always a possibility that the narrator is either actively concealing certain facts or else does not have the full picture. Thus, such narratives contain an inherent element of unreliability, and the narrator’s position within the story and inherent biases can drastically affect how that story is told.

Because the events of The Hunting Wives are filtered through the perspective of Sophie, who has a direct stake in these events, her descriptions are immediately suspect and must be analyzed in tandem with her own faults and insecurities. The trope of the unreliable narrator originally gained popularity in the English novels of the 18th century: Tales such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels feature the first-person perspectives of male English travelers whose analyses of their surroundings are deeply colored by their own social biases. Similarly, novels such as Pamela and