Bleak House Bleak House Bleak House is a novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and the story is told partly by the novel's heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of "Bleak House" is a long-running legal case, "Jarndyce and Jarndyce", which came about because someone wrote several conflicting wills. Dickens uses this case to satirise the English judicial system. Though the legal profession criticised Dickens' satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement, which
Unreliable narrator In "The Merchant's Tale" for example, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, allows his bias to slant much of his tale. In the prologue to "The Wife of Bath", the Wife often makes inaccurate quotations and incorrectly remembers stories. A controversial example of an unreliable narrator occurs in Agatha Christie's novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", where the narrator hides essential truths in the text (mainly through evasion, omission, and obfuscation) without ever overtly lying. Many readers at the time felt that the plot twist at the climax of the novel was nevertheless unfair. Christie used the concept again