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 by Vladimir Nabokov. Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator of Nabokov's "Lolita", often tells the story in such a way as to justify his hebephilia (fixation on young girls), in particular his sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. In Nabokov's "Pale Fire," the reliability, sanity and intentions of the narrator, Charles Kinbote, is one of the central themes of the novel. The narrator of A. M. Homes' "The End of Alice" deliberately withholds the full story of the crime that put him in prison—the rape and subsequent murder of a young girl—until the end of the novel. In some