Racism in the work of Charles Dickens For example, in his novel "Bleak House" Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his crude caricatures of other races has also been noted by Patrick Brantlinger in his "A Companion to the Victorian Novel". He cites Dickens' description of an Irish colony in America's Catskill mountains a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. Dickens views them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley writing in the Penguin Lives bio of Dickens writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal
Unreliable narrator reality. Zeno Cosini, the narrator of Italo Svevo's "Zeno's Conscience", is a typical example of unreliable narrator: in fact the novel is presented as a diary of Zeno himself, who unintentionally distorts the facts to justify his faults. His psychiatrist, who publishes the diary, claims in the introduction that it's a mix of truths and lies. Pi Patel, the narrator of Yann Martel's 2001 novel "Life of Pi" tells two conflicting versions of his story. After spending many days adrift at sea, he recounts a fanciful story in which he shared his lifeboat with a zebra, orangutan, hyena (which killed