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 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