The unreliable narrator in post-2003 Iraqi fiction: Frankenstein in Baghdad as a model

Abstract

This study aims to explore the technique of the unreliable narrator in contemporary Iraqi narrative fiction through an analysis of the novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, which stands as one of the most significant modern narrative texts employing this technique with intricate aesthetic and semantic functions. The research investigates the role of this technique in shaping the novel’s semantic structure and in representing the realities of violence and instability in post-2003 Baghdad. The narrative unfolds through multiple layers in which voices intersect and accounts collide, transforming the act of reading into a complex interpretive process that resists any single, stable truth.

The study focuses on how the narrator becomes a problematic element that offers fragmented or contradictory knowledge, prompting the reader to question the reliability of the narrative and to continually reassess unfolding events. The findings reveal that the technique of the unreliable narrator performs a dual aesthetic and intellectual function: on the one hand, it exposes the profound fragmentation experienced by Iraqi society; on the other, it restores to the reader an active role as an investigator seeking to construct an alternative narrative to the fractured stories embedded within the text. Thus, the novel emerges as a modernist model that transcends traditional storytelling and reflects the complexities of a reality laden with existential tensions and unanswered questions.