The Paraleptic Effect
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić
University of Donja Gorica, Faculty of Philology, Oktoih 1, ME-81000 Podgorica, Montenegro
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0078-5103; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8072-7223 
vladimir.vujosevic@udg.edu.me, dragisa.vukotic@udg.edu.me
This article examines the alleged narratological paradox of paralepsis. It is argued 
that the first-person narrators of Moby-Dick, À la recherche du temps perdu and 
The Great Gatsby (to name but three prominent examples) occasionally display 
an inexplicable awareness of facts that would be naturally inaccessible to them 
(knowledge of other people’s thoughts, minute familiarity with unwitnessed events, 
etc.). Paralepsis, as Genette calls it, can be defined as the class of situations in 
which a first-person narrator seems to exercise the impossible epistemic privilege. 
This paper argues against the existence of genuine paraleptic events on two levels. 
First, it is argued that this kind of narration is rarely epistemically paradoxical. 
Even some of the strongest candidates for paralepsis could be naturalized (the 
reader can detect possible natural ways in which the narrator might have obtained 
the seemingly impossible information). Second, even in cases where they cannot 
be convincingly naturalized, ‘paralepses’ need not be mysterious. It is often 
possible to read them (as P. Dawson has done) as “authorial performances.” 
They can be explained as instances of a specific rhetorical procedure that we 
have termed raconteural narration: a mode of narration in which, for the sake of 
more convincing exposition, mere conjectures are offered without the usual modal 
phrases that indicate the speculative quality of such assertions and thus create the 
erroneous impression of uncanny narrative knowledge.
Keywords: narratology / paralepsis / narrative epistemology / Moby-Dick / À la recherche 
du temps perdu / The Great Gatsby
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.3 (2023)
“Inexplicable” narratorial knowledge
Chapter 37 of Melville’s Moby-Dick contains Ahab’s famous madness 
maddened soliloquy. Alone in his chamber, restlessly pacing to and fro, 
the captain of the Pequod is given to the charged rhetorical ostenta-
tions and theatrical hand gestures, affronting his own “grim, phan-
tom futures” (Melville 164), solemnly vowing to take revenge on the 
white whale that bit off his leg: “I now prophesy that I will dismem-
ber my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. 
That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were.” (161–162) The vitriolic 
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62
soliloquy goes on through much of the chapter. However, we get the 
impression that something is substantially wrong with the scene the 
moment we are reminded that the novel itself and, consequently, 
this episode portraying Ahab’s unattended gestures and musings ut-
tered in the private “sacred retreat of his cabin” (118), are narrated in 
the first-person, by “one Ishmael” (5). Ishmael, “a simple sailor” (3) 
devoid of “preternatural power[s]” (119), is somehow made privy to 
“all the subtle demonisms of [Ahab’s] life and thought” (177). Vividly 
and in much detail, he describes the behavior he apparently couldn’t 
have witnessed. Here and in a few other places in the novel, Ishmael 
seems to authoritatively offer information he “could not […] possess if 
[he] functioned exactly like [an ordinary] human being” (Alber, Skov 
Nielsen and Richardson 363).
Moby-Dick is far from being an isolated example of this “impossible 
kind of telling” (Petterson 76). For instance, the crucial scene in the 
eight chapter of The Great Gatsby, the private late-night conversation 
between Michaelis and Wilson, is narrated by Nick Carraway. Without 
witnessing the actual event, Nick, as James Phelan has noted, conveys 
not just the general outline of this private conversation he could have 
been easily familiarized with (by hearing of it directly from Michaelis) 
but describes various details that are far too nuanced to be part of any 
subsequently obtained summary of the event.1 It appears that Nick, a 
first-person witness narrator, has somehow usurped the unattainable 
epistemic privilege of the ubiquitous third-person surveyor. Such a 
procedure is bound to strike us as an “outrageous ‘transgression’ of the 
norms of realistic storytelling” (Pennacchio 24).
However, what is perhaps the most radical example of a narrator 
exhibiting the unaccountable “excess of knowledge” (Dawson 196) can 
be traced back to the famous scene of Bergotte’s death in Proust’s À la 
recherche du temps perdu. It was Gérard Genette who drew the general 
attention to what he saw as the straightforward impossibility of the 
episode. Marcel, the narrator of the novel, while describing the death 
1 Nick’s description of the scene contains the “verbatim reports” (Phelan 107) 
of various unsubstantial conversational turns: “How long have you been married, 
George? Come on there, try and sit still a minute, and answer my question. […] Come 
on, George, sit still—I asked you a question.” (Fitzgerald 100) Nick’s acute awareness 
of the surroundings is strangely evocative, not of a person reporting subsequently 
obtained pieces of information, but of the third-person narrator attentively surveying 
the scene: “The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and whenever 
Michaelis heard a car […] it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few 
hours before.” (100)
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63
of a writer he admires, suddenly offers a strange record of his final 
thoughts. The narrator appears to demonstrate the impossible “psycho-
logical penetration” (Edmiston 729) as he recovers in a puzzling pro-
tocol the unrecoverable content of a dying man’s mind, thus exercising 
the knowledge that remains “irreducible by any hypothesis to the nar-
rator’s information, one we must indeed attribute to the ‘omniscient’ 
novelist” (Genette 208). Genette uses the term paralepsis2 to describe 
this class of narratorial situations in which information provided by the 
first-person narrator “exceeds his [cognitive] capacities” (Genette 205). 
These “paraleptic infractions” (Dawson 201) are troubling since they 
seem to point out the fact that some of the most influential novels (like 
Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, or À la recherche du temps perdu) are built 
upon paradoxical narratorial inconsistencies.
Nonetheless, someone could reasonably argue that there is no need 
to overelaborate these fictional occurrences. The most suitable reaction 
to a first-person narrator conveying pieces of information he cannot 
possess would be to assume that he is simply lying. The fact that people 
(be they real or fictional) are capable of asserting outrageous claims 
hardly seems to constitute a riveting theoretical enigma. To describe 
such instances as epistemically puzzling appears to be unnecessar-
ily extravagant. However, one could answer to this commonsensical 
objection that even a lie has to have some epistemic foundation. For 
example, when a witness commits perjury by claiming that the accused 
didn’t pull the trigger, such an assertion (though untruthful) is still 
based on some epistemic foundation (e.g., the assumption that the per-
son testifying was a witness or is somehow familiar with the crime). But 
what happens when someone authoritatively describes the minutiae of 
a crime without providing any basis for his claims? Paralepses are trou-
bling because they do not quite follow the logic of lying. We would 
be bewildered by someone “authoritatively” and “sincerely” claiming 
something that is neither epistemically justified nor styled as a mere 
conjecture. What does such a person want to achieve with such strange 
assertions? Something more than the supposition of narratorial dishon-
esty is needed to explain the paraleptic breach.
It seems that three necessary conditions must be met for any nar-
ratorial information to be deemed truly paraleptic. Paralepses are 
the class of narrative situations in which (1) a first-person narrator 
2 “[W]e will christen [this type of alteration] paralepsis, since here we are […] deal-
ing […] with taking up (-lepsis, from lambano) and giving information that should be 
left aside.” (Genette 195)
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exercises (2) impossible (3) epistemic privilege. When confronted with 
a paradoxical situation, the reader will usually try to neutralize it. As 
Dawson puts it, “the theory of paralepsis functions as an interpretive 
vacuum, in which critics feel compelled to furnish an explanation for a 
character narrator’s impossible […] knowledge” (Dawson 199). Thus, 
when faced with narratorial information that seems paraleptic, we can 
attempt to dissolve the paraleptic effect (the sense of the straightfor-
ward impossibility of the narrator’s knowledge of the event) by argu-
ing that one of the conditions from the abovementioned definition is 
not actually satisfied. In other words, one could try to claim that (1) 
a conveyer of “paraleptic” information is not, in fact, a first-person 
narrator, or that (2) the narrator’s possession of seemingly paraleptic 
information is possible under some previously unconsidered scenarios 
that an honest reading of the text allows for, or that (3) the narra-
tor’s “paraleptic” renditions are not genuine pieces of information (i.e., 
they are devoid of epistemic ambition and value), but merely represent 
(for example) rhetorical exercises. In the following, we’ll try to evaluate 
how each of these strategies works in the cases of the three canonical 
instances of paralepsis (from Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and À la 
recherche du temps perdu).
The “another voice” hypothesis
It is possible to speak of paralepsis only “if we still think of the first 
person as a narrator responsible for all words in the narrative” (Alber, 
Skov Nielsen and Richardson 363). We are generally untroubled by 
the extent of knowledge of third-person narrators since we assume 
that epistemic justification (“How do they know the information they 
convey?”) is already “inscribed” in the act of such narration. Third-
person narrators seem to know things by the very convention of sto-
rytelling. The paraleptic effect would dissipate, the argument goes, if 
“we […] posit a [third-person] voice of the narrative” (Skov Nielsen 
132) whenever “substantial and extensive information is relayed which 
the I-narrator cannot possibly know” (Heinze 288). In such a sce-
nario, the first-person narrators would occasionally share the narrato-
rial authority with some covert third-person presence. For example, 
there is no reason to insist that Ishmael is the one describing Ahab’s 
private behavior in chapter 37 of Moby-Dick if we can attribute this 
rendition to some clandestine third-person narrator that occasional-
ly intrudes on Ishmael’s witness accounts and seizes control over the 
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
65
narrative. Pennacchio has argued that such unannounced shifts to the 
third-person narratorial perspective are not uncommon in various cin-
ematic narratives. There is a plethora of examples of the character’s 
narration existing simultaneously with segments that are “inconsistent 
with [the I-narrator’s] knowledge” (Pennacchio 35). For instance, in 
Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot, the protagonist is also the witness-narrator, 
leading us through his experiences (he begins his account by address-
ing an imaginary, ideal listener with “Hello friend”). However, there 
are still numerous scenes in the series that can hardly be part of the 
main character’s witness narration since he could not have the di-
rect experience of these events (for example, the murder of his child-
hood friend, Angela, is minutely portrayed although he was not at the 
scene). Pennacchio offers a similar example from Nic Pizzolatto’s True 
Detective (35). We are generally untroubled by the presence of this 
additional narratorial perspective. It seems that one could easily argue 
that “for narratives like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby, this [explana-
tion] works beautifully” (Heinze 288).
However, it is necessary to point out one specific problem: the 
“another voice” hypothesis works much more beautifully in (what 
can be termed) the mediated first-person narratives than in the non-
mediated ones. For example, Benjy’s chapter in The Sound and the 
Fury is obviously mediated. He is the narrator, but he is not the one 
recording the narration. Benjy’s thoughts and words seem to be “mys-
teriously caught and transcribed” (Genette 230) by some “spirit of 
storytelling” (Skov Nielsen 138). Since the narrators like Benjy (or 
Quentin and Jason Compson) are not writers, the possibility of their 
narration depends on the existence of another “semi-omniscient,” 
third-person agency that is covertly present in such narratives. Since 
the mediated renditions are not characterized by the strict unity of 
narration, the potential intrusion of “another voice” would not be 
particularly troubling.3
Unlike Benjy, the narrators of Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and 
À la recherche du temps perdu are authorial, writerly personae aiming 
at total control over their stories. Ishamel explicitly refers to himself 
as “the writer hereof” (Melville 200) and describes his narration as 
“an ever gathering volume” (173). Nick Carraway self-identifies as 
the writer of “this book” (Fitzgerald 3), continuously rereading “over 
what [he has] written so far” (37). Similarly, Proust’s Marcel refers to 
3 This seems to be the case in the fourth chapter of The Sound and the Fury, where 
the hitherto latent semi-omniscient teller completely takes hold of the narration.
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himself on numerous occasions as the author of “this book” (Proust 
1878, 2132, 2408, 2661). They are not merely minds conveying 
thoughts, voices among other voices, but writers producing and orga-
nizing authorial texts.4
There is explicit self-centredness to such written, controlled auto-
biographical narratives that would make a potential interference of 
another disembodied narratorial voice in such texts a striking incon-
gruity. To postulate, nevertheless, some such phantom agency that 
occasionally wrestles authority away from these writer-narrators 
would strike us as a suspiciously ad hoc procedure of unwarrantedly 
“multiply[ing] possible agents” (Dawson 196) and thus violating the 
principle of parsimony. Two solutions still remain: either there is some 
implicit explanation in the texts for the “overreaching” claims of these 
narrators, or they are, for some reason, merely acting out the third-
person (semi-omniscient) perspective.
“(Un)natural” explanations of uncanny narratorial 
knowledge
One way to subdue the paraleptic effect would be to argue that al-
though the first-person narrator’s seemingly impossible “range of in-
sight” (Skov Nielsen 139) is left unjustified, it could nevertheless be 
implicitly “justifiable” (Edmiston 740). That is, there may still be some 
unstated but possible scenario that would explain the narrator’s “in-
explicable” knowledge. These implicit explanations of the seemingly 
paraleptic narratorial information could be divided into two main 
types: they can be either (a) “unnatural”5 or (b) “natural.”
4 Reflecting on Proust’s Marcel (and the same holds for Ishmael and Nick Car-
raway), Genette observes that he functions “as source, guarantor, and organizer of the 
narrative, as analyst and commentator, as stylist (as ‘writer’)” (167).
5 This term has recently gained new currency due to the emergence of the so-called 
“unnatural narratology,” a relatively new field exclusively dealing with non-realistic/
anti-mimetic fiction. “Unnatural” (a somewhat controversial term with a moralistic 
cadence) is now broadly used to describe any storyworld whose “laws and encyclo-
pedias […] differ significantly from those operating in the real world” (Von Contzen 
14). In this respect, narrators who are non-human or have non-human faculties (such 
as cognitive or sensory superpowers) are described (for better or worse) as “unnatural.” 
We will use the term in this general sense.
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
67
(A) “Unnatural” Scenarios
One way to avoid the paradox would be to argue that paraleptic claims 
are the products of some “unnatural mind” (Dawson 200). If the 
narrator is a ghost or a deity, the paraleptic effect will not occur since it 
seems that the knowledge of such narrators is already justified by their 
“unnaturally” privileged position. If we assume, the argument runs, 
that Ishmael or Marcel are unnaturally gifted (for example) with telepa-
thy (that is, that they are not ordinary human narrators), the paraleptic 
effect will disappear. “The more the narrator appears non-human, the 
fewer the logical inconsistencies in combining paralepsis and experien-
tiality.” (Heinze 283)
However, to brush aside the paraleptic effect by attributing “unnat-
ural” qualities to the narrator’s mind seems to be unsatisfying since, as 
Heinze notes, “nothing suggests” (281) that narrators like Ishmael (or 
Nick and Marcel, for that matter) have extraordinary, super-human 
abilities. On the contrary, there are various textual clues suggesting the 
opposite. For example, Ishmael often exhibits natural human doubts 
and uncertainties “touching Ahab’s deeper parts” (Melville 453). He 
regularly engages in speculation: “It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly 
why it was that […] Ahab thus acted. It may have been [this] or [that].” 
(464) Regarding other people’s actions, he frequently “opine[s]” and 
“surmise[s]” (399). He’s fully aware of his natural cognitive restric-
tions: “[A]ll this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can 
go.” (180) This also seems to be the case with Marcel and Nick.6
The main problem with this strategy is that the sense of incon-
sistency cannot be eliminated by any general supposition about the 
unnaturalness of the storyworld or the narrator’s mind. Even if we were 
to suppose that Ishamel has the gift of clairvoyance or something of 
the sort, the inconsistency would still remain. In that case, Ishmael’s 
natural human limitations and uncertainties concerning other people’s 
minds would suddenly become inexplicable. We would be merely shift-
ing focus. Paralepsis seems to be an essentially insular phenomenon. 
6 For example, Marcel seems unaware of various realities a mind-reading narrator 
would be conscious of. Thus, he is initially uncertain whether Albertine knew Léa (see 
Proust 1944). Also, he cannot easily read the enigmatic “gaze” (Proust 684) of Baron 
de Charlus as denoting his homosexuality. He eventually becomes aware of these facts, 
but only through the natural process of behavioristic inferences, gossip, etc. Nick Car-
raway also displays natural cognitive limitations: the precise way some events have 
happened “eludes [him]” (Fitzgerald 80), his understanding of other people’s inten-
tions is gradual, etc.
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It is always “local.” Heinze’s distinction between global and local para-
lepses7 thus appears unnecessary. For instance, the narrator of Sebold’s 
Lovely Bones, to offer Heinze’s example for “global” paralepsis, is a 
dead girl who knows more than an ordinary human being can. But 
this would not be an example of paralepsis since there is a manifest 
“unnatural” explanation for the narrator’s extensive knowledge. She 
is speaking from a vantage point of heaven where she is provided 
with special insights (her very narratorial position is “supernatural”). 
Paralepses are not simply phenomena that are inconsistent with the 
way things are in the actual world. It is not merely an “unnatural” way 
of telling but the seemingly inexplicable way of knowing that generates 
the paraleptic effect.
(B) “Natural” Scenarios
Another way to deal with the paraleptic effect would be to argue that, 
on closer inspection, the text allows for “natural, realistic sources of the 
character narrator’s unusual knowledge” (Heinze 285). Though unstat-
ed, there still may be some “natural” explanation for extraordinary nar-
ratorial information. This strategy seems promising in substantially dis-
sipating the paraleptic effect in the cases of the three notable examples 
from Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and À la recherche du temps perdu.
Let us start with Moby-Dick. The most puzzling, paraleptic feature 
of Ishmael’s narration, Alber et al. claim, is that his narrative occa-
sionally “provides extended access to the thoughts of other characters” 
(Melville 361). However, this is sensu stricto inaccurate. Nowhere in the 
novel does Ishmael report the unverbalized, intrinsically private mental 
states of others. There are some cases where Ishmael seems to penetrate 
the “impenetrable Japans” (471) of other minds. For instance, in chap-
ter 41, Ishmael observes that “in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of 
this, namely: all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad” 
(179). But this is far from being an example of some mystifying para-
leptic knowledge. He is merely reconstructing Ahab’s inner life from 
various behavioral hints: from his “glaring eyes” (194) and from the 
general familiarity with his goals and obsessions. Ishmael here acts as 
a “Champollion [deciphering] the Egypt of [Ahab’s] face” (339). If 
7 Heinze uses the phrase “global paralepsis” for the situations in which “the entire 
narration is non-natural” (e.g., the narrator himself is a non-human entity), while 
“local paralepsis” refers to cases where an ordinary human narrator within a “natural” 
storyworld offers information he cannot naturally possess (Heinze 286).
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
69
someone were to say to us, “I know that he secretly loves her, even 
though he doesn’t show it,” we wouldn’t normally suppose that such 
a person is thereby declaring some inexplicable familiarity with exclu-
sively private thoughts of an unapproachable Cartesian mind hidden 
behind the poker face façade. Various subtle behavioral indiscretions 
can betray us to a perceptive observer. We make behavioristic infer-
ences and more or less grounded guesses about the minds of others all 
the time.8
Furthermore, the striking feature of Moby-Dick seems to be the 
unusual cognitive extroversion of the characters. The novel is almost 
suspiciously scarce in entirely private events. Like actors soliloquizing 
on stage, the characters almost always verbalize their thoughts, feel-
ings, and even streams of consciousness in audible utterances.9 This is 
also the case with Ahab’s soliloquy in chapter 37. When something is 
spoken and not merely thought about in the solitude of one’s room, we 
cannot speak of absolute, “bulletproof” privacy. Everything uttered on 
a ship full of people can be known by others, in one way or another: 
“In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers?” 
(Melville 460)
So, how could Ishmael be aware of Ahab’s private soliloquy (and even 
his accompanying hand gestures) in chapter 37? We know that the door 
of Ahab’s cabin is “a thin one” (Melville 503); so thin in fact that, on 
one occasion, Starbucks could hear him from the outside “muttering 
8 Heinze seems to regard the narration in Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as yet 
another example of the paraleptic telling, for the narrator “claims to ‘suddenly . . . 
know’ what he has no access to” (Heinze 280). But on closer inspection, it seems that 
nothing uncanny is taking place in the passage Heinze is referring to. The seemingly 
paraleptic scene could be easily “naturalized” as an inference from the knowledge of 
one’s routine and behavior. Here is the “controversial” excerpt: “What did he even talk 
to them about—when they were under four eyes?—Ah, well, suddenly, as if by a flash 
of inspiration, I know. For all good soldiers are sentimentalists—all good soldiers of 
that type.” (Ford 54) The narrator does not actually claim the possession of some inex-
plicable insight about the contents of private conversations between Captain Edward 
Ashburnham and his wife but merely offers an inferential reconstruction based on two 
“natural” sources: his intimate familiarity with Ashburnhams over many years and his 
general knowledge about the people of Ashburnham’s type.
9 In chapter 29, to offer just one example, after the late-night confrontation with 
Ahab, Stubb is heading back to his room engaged with the following thoughts: “I was 
never served so before without giving a hard blow for it, muttered Stubb. […] I don’t 
well know whether to go back and strike him, or […] down here on my knees and pray 
for him?” (Melville 123) His thoughts are not invested with absolute mental privacy 
since he is “muttering” them, and thus they can be overheard. This propensity to speak 
one’s stream of consciousness seems to be a common occurrence in the novel.
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in his sleep” (503). Furthermore, his door had “blinds inserted, in place 
of upper panels” (503), enabling thus some indelicate observer to peek 
inside. And Ishmael himself seems to be inclined toward voyeuristic 
behavior. In chapter 34, he observes Ahab presiding “over his own 
private dinner table” (144) by peeping “through the cabin sky-light” 
(145). For every seemingly paraleptic information offered by Ishmael, 
we can uncover a “natural” explanation rendering it possible. There 
seem to be no real paralepses in Moby-Dick (if they are the cases of fully 
inexplicable narratorial knowledge). The possibility of some “natural” 
explanation of the narratorial information (however far-fetched) is 
always left open in Ishmael’s narration.
The same seems to be true in the case of The Great Gatsby. Not a sin-
gle piece of information Nick Carraway reports is sensu stricto unavail-
able to him. When he describes the unwitnessed dialogue between 
Michaelis and Wilson in a strangely intricate manner, he could be 
merely reproducing Michaelis’ over-elaborated testimony after Gatsby’s 
murder and Wilson’s suicide. Anything witnessed by someone, no mat-
ter how insignificant or trivial, could circulate as information. Phelan 
is right when he suggests that, in the case of The Great Gatsby, there is 
no violation of “the conventions of mimesis” (Phelan 110). There is 
a “natural” explanation for Nick’s narratorial information. Thus, it is 
not, properly speaking, paraleptic.
But how to account for what is perhaps the strongest exemplar 
of paraleptic narration: namely, Marcel’s report of Bergotte’s final 
thoughts in À la recherche du temps perdu? Genette argues that the scene 
“present[s] a physical impossibility,” the narratorial information that 
(unlike Carraway’s rendition of the Wilson-Michaelis exchange) could 
not “in point of fact have been reported to Marcel since no one—
for a very good reason—could have knowledge of [it]” (Genette 208). 
Marcel’s familiarity with Bergotte’s “deathbed” thoughts seems utterly 
inexplicable. To use Genette’s phrasing, this is “one paralepsis to end 
all paralepses” (208).
But even here, in this “impossible” rendition, there seems to be 
some mimetic, “natural” way out, however narrow it may appear. 
Bergotte dies not in the private enclosure of his chamber but in a public 
venue, surrounded by people, while attending an exhibition of Dutch 
painting. Before being struck with apoplexy, he attentively observes 
Vermeer’s View of Delft. “‘That is how I ought to have written,’ he said 
[disait-il]” (Proust 1974). A verb denoting utterance, not merely inner 
thoughts (dire; to say, to tell), is employed here to describe Bergotte’s 
final cognitive engagement. “‘All the same,’ he said to himself [se disait-
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71
il]. […] While doing so, he sank down upon a circular divan […] 
and […] told himself [se dit]: ‘It is just an ordinary indigestion.’ […] 
Visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead.” 
(Proust 1975) Thus, the sense of utter privacy is dissolved. Whatever is 
whispered, grimaced, murmured, said (as to oneself) in a room full of 
“visitors and attendants” can become an object of gossipy dissemina-
tions, of “so many indiscretions” that are typical for “Proustian uni-
verse” (Genette 207).
Almost any seemingly paraleptic occurrence can be “naturalized” 
in one way or another. To conceive an utterly private event that can-
not be possibly known to others seems harder than one would initially 
suppose since “the boundary between perceptual possibility and impos-
sibility is often nebulous” (Edmiston 740). If we describe paralepsis in 
strong terms of epistemic impossibility and inexplicability (and this 
was the common way to define it10), then all these well-known exam-
ples of paralepsis would not be, strictly speaking, paraleptic. If there is 
(even a weak) explanation or justification for the narrator’s puzzling 
knowledge, there is no reason to speak of epistemic paradox. The weak 
justification would only constitute a case for narratorial unreliability 
(which is not paradoxical).11
Raconteural narration
Even when paralepsis (as the epistemic paradox) is dissolved, its effect 
may still linger. These narratorial situations seem (still) to be some-
what troubling, not so much for epistemic reasons (“How could these 
narrators possibly know the impossible information they convey?”) but 
primarily for rhetorical ones (“Why do they convey the information in 
such a strange manner?”). It was never an exclusively epistemic issue 
10 Edmiston, for example, describes paralepsis as the “type of infraction in which 
the narrating self says more than he could possibly know” (Edmiston 741). Similarly, 
Nünlist and de Jong define it in terms of epistemic impossibility, as the situation in 
which the narrator “know[s] more than he properly can” (Nünlist and de Jong 170). 
Caroline Rody characterizes paralepsis as “impossible” and “logically infeasible” infor-
mation (qtd. in Dawson 215).
11 Some narrative situations could be described as ersatz paralepses. Such seem-
ingly overreaching claims are not really paraleptic (although they appear to be) because 
they are explicitly devoid of epistemic value. They are not information but imagina-
tion. For example, the narrator of Moody’s The Ice Storm seems to be familiar with 
other people’s thoughts, only to admit later on, as Dawson notes, that he’s only “the 
imaginer of all these consciousnesses” (Dawson 206).
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
72
to begin with. We are not perplexed so much by the possibility of, 
e.g., Nick Carraway’s indirect knowledge of various subtle (even mi-
nuscule) details of the conversation between Wilson and Michaelis (for 
there are conceivable “natural” ways for Nick to know them). What 
troubles us in his narration is the surprising “reduction of speech to 
event” (Genette 170). Namely, the sense of anomaly is raised not by 
information per se, but by its strange rendition that suggests direct, 
“point-blank” observation (when the possibility of such observation is 
often explicitly excluded). The problem is that “paraleptic” narrators 
offer descriptions that are frequently styled neither as mere speculations 
nor as accounts based on the (elaborated) testimonies of others but 
function as direct, confident, momentary eye-witness experiences. Paul 
Dawson has offered an influential explanation for this procedure: what 
was termed paralepsis is “best understood not as a quality of […] nar-
ratorial knowledge, but as a specific rhetorical performance of narrative 
authority” (Dawson 212).
What does this mean? Narrators such as Ishmael, Nick, or Marcel 
are not “fictional autobiographers” (Pennacchio 24): they are, as 
Pennacchio observes drawing upon Dawson, “authors” using “the 
novel [not the autobiography] as the model genre for the act of telling” 
(32). Simply put, they are not so much reporting events as “creating a 
story” (32).12 So, the question of knowledge is otiose here. Ultimately, 
paralepsis is “the artifice of fiction” (Dawson 210), the name for the 
class of situations in which the narrator, caught up in the act of telling, 
assumes a certain novelistic persona that allows him to move beyond his 
actual experiences. The narrator’s conjectures, dim guesses, and vague 
hints of events are designed as direct, confident telling for the sake of 
narrative dynamics, vividness, and persuasiveness.
It seems that this “novelistic” perspective enables the narrator to 
offer stability to his often-fragmented experiences, to endow them 
with a stable “genre identity.” To make a coherent (auto)biography 
(in which events are interconnected) often means to produce a story 
about oneself, to fictionalize one’s experiences to some degree in order 
12 This explanation works especially well in the cases of Moby-Dick and À la recher-
che du temps perdu. In Proust’s novel, as Morton P. Levitt notes, “Marcel’s presumed 
autobiography turns inevitably—for Marcel is above all an artist—into a fiction” (qtd. 
in Dawson 197). Similarly in Moby-Dick, Ishmael compares himself to Cervantes and 
his narratorial technique to that of a novelist: “If, then, to meanest mariners, and 
renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave 
round them tragic graces; […] bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! […] 
Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and 
paupered arm of old Cervantes.” (Melville 113)
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
73
to make human life “more readable (lisible)” (Ricoeur 73). This is the 
point famously made by Ricoeur: to present one’s life as a tight-knit 
sequence of events (as a meaningful narrative) is to construct “the sort 
of dynamic identity proper to the plot” (77). The events of “my life” 
thus become the story I tell to myself or others, a story that borrows 
from the stable genre of the classic novel in which every event contrib-
utes to some final denouement. This “interconnectedness of life” (77) is 
rarely the case outside the fiction for, as Käte Hamburger notes, “[r]eal-
ity itself merely is. It does not mean. Only the non-real has the power 
to convert the real into sense, into meaning” (Hamburger 231). Thus, 
in the case of Moby-Dick, it comes as no surprise that Ishmael, the 
narrator, borrows from various genres of fiction in order to create “the 
durable character of an individual” (Ricoeur 77), particularly of Ahab. 
What is, for example, Ahab’s melancholic address to the decapitated 
head of a whale in chapter 70 but an evocation of Hamlet’s “Alas, poor 
Yorick” speech, a peculiar Shakespearian pastiche, a narratorial strategy 
of endowing Ahab’s actions with the identity of revenge tragedy? To 
ask whether this address is an authentic, mimetic report of an actual 
event witnessed by Ishmael thus seems to be meritless.
Furthermore, what is termed “paralepsis” is nothing but a rhetorical 
procedure often employed not only in novelistic storytelling but also 
in various conversational situations. While retelling an event, a partic-
ularly dynamic and charged interlocutor (a speaker usually described 
as a raconteur) will sometimes add various details to the story for the 
narrative effect. For example, he will render non-dialogic bits of infor-
mation in the form of imagined, artificial dialogue (this often happens 
when one is recounting events in an anecdotal manner) in order to 
achieve dramatic or comic impact or even suspense.13 This procedure, 
which we can (for the present purposes) term raconteural narration, 
13 This is something that Ishamel does, e.g., in chapter 90, when he recounts an 
incident, presumably known to him from the newspapers or some such instance, of 
some mariners of Dover who, having caught a whale, were forced to surrender it to the 
Lord Warden. Ishmael anecdotally renders the episode through imaginary, made-up 
dialogue between the sailors and the Lord Warden’s representative: “‘Hands off! This 
fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it as the Lord Warden’s.’ Upon this the poor 
mariners […] knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching their heads all 
round. […] At length one of them […] made bold to speak, ‘Please, sir, who is the 
Lord Warden?’ ‘The Duke.’ ‘But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?’ ‘It 
is his’.” (Melville 389) This is merely a specimen of Ishmael’s raconteurship that no 
reader or listener is troubled with. Nothing is puzzling here. He is simply translating 
general information into the dynamic form of imaginary dialogue in order to achieve 
a more captivating effect on his listeners.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
74
is often used, as a rhetorical strategy, in vivid and engaging forms of 
telling, not only in novels but also in sermons,14 historiographical ren-
ditions, comedies, etc. Such a procedure (of enhancing the rendition 
of events with imagined dialogues and soliloquies) is never, in the 
strict sense, troubling to the readers. We recognize it for what it is.15 
Engaging and compelling storytellers (and such are Ishmael, Marcel, 
and Nick) will often resort to this rhetorical strategy. In such cases, 
we usually accept the focal part of the narration as authentic, without 
subscribing to the literal veracity of all the dialogic details. We usu-
ally read Ahab’s soliloquies in Moby-Dick as conveying something true 
about his “monomaniacal” personality without simultaneously assum-
ing that they are perplexing verbatim renditions of Ahab’s utterances 
preserved in Ishmael’s hyperthymestic memory. That is, these are 
raconteural reconstructions roughly based on the data Ishmael could 
have gathered in some “natural” way. To treat them as literal reports 
that are to be taken at face value would amount to misunderstanding 
an easily identifiable rhetorical procedure that is an integral part of 
almost all captivating narrations (in fiction or otherwise).16
14 In Moby-Dick, Fr. Mapple retells the biblical story of Jonah by “inventing dia-
logue” in which, “in anachronistically everyday terms” (Gallagher 14), mariners from 
ancient Joppa whisper to one another: “‘Jack, he’s robbed a widow;’ or ‘Joe, do you 
mark him; he’s a bigamist;’ or, ‘Harry lad, I guess he’s the adulterer that broke jail in 
old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing murderers from Sodom’.” (Melville 42) 
We are not troubled by the extent of Fr. Mapple’s rendition of an unwitnessed event, 
for we are aware that his sermon offers just a rhetorical simulation of dialogue for the 
sake of more engaging storytelling.
15 Phelan is right when he claims that “most readers do not even register” para-
lepses as “anomalous” (Phelan 109). We almost intuitively identify it as the rhetorical 
exercise of raconteural narration. Nick, e.g., is offering the information (he could eas-
ily possess) cloaked in the form of artificial dialogue and presumed ambiance for the 
sake of narrative effect.
16 Ishmael occasionally asserts that some of his accounts are to be taken as literally 
true. However, there is often a certain ludicrous quality to such claims. In chapter 
54, to offer just one example, while telling the Town-Ho story to his comrades in 
Lima, Ishmael melodramatically asks for the “largest sized” Gospel to be procured 
with a “venerable priest” (Melville 252) so that he can solemnly make a sworn oath. 
The reader can easily recognize fictional devices Ishmael employs in constructing his 
renditions of events (like the Shakespearian pastiche, dramatic dialogic exchanges, 
revenge tragedy topoi, etc.), but at the same time, Ishmael resorts to the affirmations 
of literal, “documentary” truth in his narration. However, this procedure is not genu-
inely puzzling since it could be claimed that, in fictional discourse, such affirmations 
of the story’s veracity are frequently just another “signpost” of fictionalization, “that 
is, the narrative device that [ironically] suggests the fictionality of the text” (Bell and 
Ryan 16). One can recall (for example) Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, in which the fictional 
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
75
Conclusion
What Genette termed “paralepsis” was usually defined as the narra-
tological paradox of the first person narrator “disclosing knowledge 
[he] could not possess” (Alber, Skov Nielsen and Richardson 363). If 
we take “N” to denote the “narrator” and “C” any “character” of the 
novel,17 the paradox can be expressed in the following form:
(N>C) ∧ (N=C).
The conjuctional proposition asserts something contradictory: the nar-
rator (N) knows more than any character of the novel (C) could know18 
and, simultaneously, the narrator is one of the characters. The narra-
tor of Moby-Dick (and this is, mutatis mutandis, also true of The Great 
Gatsby, and À la recherche du temps perdu) occasionally seems to know 
more than is strictly possible for any of the characters to know (e.g., 
various unwitnessed private events, thoughts of others, discreet solilo-
quies, etc.) and, at the same time, we know that the narrator is Ishmael, 
“one of the crew” (Melville, 172). The problem is that if the propo-
sitions “N>C” and “N=C” are both true, the contradictory conclu-
sion will necessarily ensue: “N>N.” The standard way of dismantling 
this contradiction would be to argue that, in the case of any particular 
“paraleptic” situation, either “N>C” or “N=C” is not actually realized.
(1) What we have termed another voice hypothesis is a strategy of 
attacking “N=C.” If we somehow assume that “N≠C” is true, the paradox 
will evaporate. Perhaps, Ishamel is not the sole narrator, and there could 
very well be another (semi)omniscient third-person narratorial presence 
(which cannot be identified with any of the characters) narrating some 
sections of the novel. However, this is, as we have argued, a weak solution 
to the paradox in the cases of the three novels we are dealing with, since 
the narrators like Ishmael, Marcel, and Nick Carraway are not merely 
conveyors of events, but authors exercising writerly authority. To suppose 
that there is some clandestine narratorial voice intruding on these con-
trolled, authorial written testimonies would strike us as a clear-cut nar-
rative incongruity and unwarranted multiplication of narratorial agents.
(2) On the other hand, there seem to be two ways of arguing against 
the proposition “N>C” in these three particular “paraleptic” scenarios.
author-historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, while presenting the readers with an incred-
ible story about supernatural events, provides the alleged sworn court testimonies and 
pledges of authenticity.
17 A somewhat similar notation was employed in Edmiston 741.
18 This is usually the case with the third-person narrators.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2023
76
(2.1) One would be to claim that “N>C” does not stand if the 
character-narrator is somehow “unnaturally” gifted. For example, if we 
assume that Marcel is clairvoyant, his knowledge of Bergotte’s final 
thoughts would not be epistemically paradoxical. This strategy could 
be termed the “unnatural” explanation. However, the text itself does 
not provide sufficient grounds for such an extravagant supposition, and 
this kind of explanation would merely be the evasion of the problem. 
If Marcel is a telepathic narrator, then his “natural” human doubts 
regarding other people’s intentions would suddenly become puzzling 
and in need of explanation.
(2.2) A more promising way of refuting the clause “N>C” would 
be to argue that, on closer inspection, N claims nothing that C cannot 
“naturally” know. That is, there is a possible implicit “natural” expla-
nation for any “paraleptic” piece of information the narrator offers. If 
there is some (however unlikely, but still possible) way for C to know 
something, we can no longer speak of epistemic impossibility. We have 
argued that the line dividing private mental contents and observable 
behavior is not as clear and well-charted as it may initially appear. 
Even without telepathic abilities, what is possible to know about others 
(through eavesdropping, unintentional behavioral disclosures, through 
other people’s elaborated witness accounts, etc.) is highly “elastic” 
(Phelan 110). This strategy seems to work in the cases of the three 
paraleptic examples that we have reviewed.
(3) There is also a third way of dismantling the paradox. Following 
Dawson, this procedure can be described as a rhetorical explanation. 
One could simply argue that the operator “>” in “N>C” does not 
designate epistemic inequality (“N knows more than C”) but merely a 
locutory fact (“N says more than C could know”). In such a case, both 
propositions (“N>C” and “N=C”) could be simultaneously true. To 
say more than one could know is hardly troubling per se since it con-
stitutes an ordinary feature of human behavior (for example, when we 
say to someone who is in distress: “Everything is going to be all right”). 
There are numerous rhetorical circumstances in which even the propo-
sition “N>N” (if “>” is understood as a rhetorical operator) does not 
raise the sense of paradox. For instance, when recounting an episode 
in the raconteural mode, some particularly engaged narrators tend to 
“translate” an indirectly obtained information into a more engaging 
form of dialogue, or to simply “imaginatively reconstruct”19 someone’s 
unwitnessed behavior. Strictly speaking, they are saying more than they 
19 Cf. Dawson 209.
Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
77
know, but we understand that they are not offering literal, mimetic 
reports. This seems to be the case, e.g., in Plato’s Symposium,20 a text 
in which speeches and dialogic exchanges between the participants of 
the banquet are reported by Apollodorus, a man who was absent from 
the event. We are not troubled by Apollodorus’ rendition of various 
minute details (just as we are not troubled by Nick’s report in the eight 
chapter of The Great Gatsby), for we understand that such a delivery 
is merely a rhetorical enhancement of some secondhand information. 
There’s no need to understand Nick’s (or Ishmael’s or Marcel’s) elabo-
rated renditions as expressions of their direct knowledge of events. In 
some cases, we tend to offer our conjectures as descriptions for the 
sake of rhetorical persuasiveness or effect. The modal expressions point-
ing out the speculative quality of such renditions (like “perhaps,” “it 
could/may be,” “possibly,” etc.) are not explicitly stated but are, nev-
ertheless, latent. What is omitted but could be implicitly read in, e.g., 
Nick’s rendition of the conversation between Michaelis and Wilson is: 
“It probably went something like this…” There’s nothing particularly 
paradoxical here, for the very art of storytelling seems to be generally 
related to this rhetorical strategy.
There seems to be no conceivable “paraleptic” situation that can-
not be “naturalized” in one of these three ways. For any specific case 
of the first-person narrator’s “impossible” knowledge, either there are 
valid reasons (1) to presume an additional narratorial presence or (2) to 
claim the existence of some implicit epistemic justification for the nar-
rator’s seemingly “impossible” cognizance or (3) to read the narrator’s 
account not as literal, mimetic report of actual events, but as some type 
of covert fictionalization. The paradox of paraleptic narration seems to 
be a pseudo-problem, both epistemically and narratologically.
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Vladimir Vujošević, Dragiša Vukotić:     The Paraleptic Effect
79
Učinek paralepse
Ključne besede: naratologija / paralepsa / pripovedna epistemologija / Moby-Dick / À 
la recherche du temps perdu / The Great Gatsby
V članku preučujeva domnevni naratološki paradoks paralepse. Mogoče je 
trditi, da (prvoosebni) pripovedovalci Moby-Dicka, À la recherche du temps 
perdu in Velikega Gatsbyja (če navedemo zgolj tri vidne primere) občasno izka-
žejo nepojasnjeno zavedanje dejstev, ki bi morala biti po naravni poti nedo-
stopna (prepoznavanje misli drugih ljudi, podrobna seznanjenost z dogodki, 
ki jim niso bili priča itd.). Paralepso, kot jo je poimenoval Genette, lahko 
opredelimo kot situacijo, v kateri se zdi, da ima prvoosebni pripovedovalec 
poseben epistemični privilegij. Članek argumentira stališče proti obstoju 
paraleptičnih dogodkov na dveh ravneh. Prvič, trdi, da je tovrstna naracija le 
redko epistemično paradoksalna, saj bi bilo mogoče naturalizirati celo neka-
tere najbolj izrazite kandidate za paralepso (bralec ali bralka lahko zaznata 
možne naravne načine, po katerih bi pripovedovalec ali pripovedovalka uteg-
nila pridobiti na videz nemogoče informacije). Drugič, tudi ko paraleptičnih 
primerov ni mogoče prepričljivo naturalizirati, ti niso nujno begajoči. Pogosto 
jih lahko beremo kot avtorske »uprizoritve« (po vzoru P. Dawsona) in poja-
snimo kot primere posebnega retoričnega postopka, ki smo ga poimenovali 
»raconteurska« pripoved: pripovedovanje s podajanjem domnev, zaradi večje 
prepričljivosti brez običajnih modalnih besednih zvez, ki bi opozarjale na špe-
kulativnost takšnih trditev – s čimer nastaja napačen vtis o nenavadnem pri-
povedovalskem znanju.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 82.0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i3.04