We contend that Mansfield's use of this form of unreliable third-person fiction is her unique contribution to the short story genre. In order to read such narratives effectively, the reader must reappraise the value of certain other stylistic elements, including the use of directives involved with directly quoted speech, seemingly minor discrepancies between adjacent sentences and, perhaps most importantly, the structure of the fiction itself. ' Nonetheless, in the essay that follows, three of Katherine Mansfield's short stories - ' A Cup of Tea ' (1922), ' Bliss ' (1918) and ' Revelations ' (1920) - will be examined in order to demonstrate how the strategic suppression of the distinction between the voice of the narrator and that of the central character can lead to a strong sense of unreliability.

The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a story would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling, a commitment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author's ' norms of the work. The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contradiction in terms. In the first, the narrator upgrade the words of a character, typically by offering a shorter, ameliorated version as a substitute for what would have been the character’s directly quoted speech in the second, the narrator downgrades, by offering a more obscure version as a substitute for what would have been the character’s directly quoted speech. Monitored speech takes two principal forms. Monitored speech thus refers to the equivalence relation that exists between directly quoted speech and the variety of speech paraphrase.

Indeed, this alternative explanation is preferable because it throws valuable light on an aspect of novelistic discourse that has remained remarkably undeveloped: the monitoring of the directly quoted speech of a particular character through the presentation of a substitute form. The passage in which Forster suggests that Lady Bertram is transformed from a flat into a round character is explicable, however, in terms other than those the English novelist proposes.

In Aspects of the Novel, E.M Forster makes a distinction between round and flat characters that has achieved a certain celebrity.

Flat character definition