UNRELIABLE NARRATOR AND DOUBT IN THE TURN OF THE SCREW BY HENRY JAMES

In this article we explore the narrative features of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. This work is considered to be one of the most controversial in relation to the author's design and description of the characters. Until recently, the controversy was focused only on whether the events in the narrative are really mystical (within the reality of the text), or the ghosts described by the heroine are the product of her imagination. In recent years there has been a tendency to consider this work in the light of narratology and structuralism. We consider this approach to be appropriate, because for Henry James as a writer and a literary critic the form and content of the text were inextricably linked, and in his later writings he sometimes favored a form over content. The Turn of the Screw is known primarily for its ambiguity. Written in the genre of "scary tales," it not only reveals the events in Bly, but, which is typical of late James, draws a psychological portrait of the main character. The narrative features of The Turn of the Screw create the effect of an "unreliable narrator", and this has caused controversy in the literary environment as to whether the ghosts that the governess speaks about are real or generated by her sick imagination; whether Flora and Miles are innocent children or they have already been spoiled by the vicious servants, whose influence the governess is trying to protect them from. We are inclined to believe that the ambiguity of the novella was the author's intention. Considering the focusing of the work, we arrive at the conclusion that the work is double-layered. On the surface, there is a scary ghost story, and beneath there is an allegory of oppression of forced respectability from which the protagonist is afflicted with.

In the last couple of decades the interest of literary critics to the genres which were previously treated as minor has grown. While realistic novels by Henry James are well known and well studied, his novellas and stories about the supernatural were ignored by Ukrainian scholars for a considerable period of time.
The Turn of the Screw still remains the most fabulous piece of work by Henry James, causing literary observers and critics to argue about its ambiguity. This In the post-soviet countries Henry James was generally known as an author of realistic novels, while realistic genres were traditionally preferred to non-realistic ones. According to T. L. Selitrina, once a "serious" author had added the fantastic element to his narration, it was treated as a parable, which had the purpose to "rehabilitate" him in the eyes of strict literary critics. [10, p. 98]. However, as Henry James was thought to belong to "Genteel tradition", his works were not considered to be important for the mass reader, therefore his name is still unfamiliar to the general public.
T. Selitrina relegates mysterious novels and short stories written by James in the There are two more narrators and over fifty years between the governess and the reader. Moreover, she and another narrator are dead for the time of telling the story, namely, we are deprived of any witnesses.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator is looking forward to a ghost story, which is to be read by a man named Douglas. The action takes place on Christmas Eve, and the narrator is one of several listeners waiting for a scary story. Douglas backs up his story using the diary of some woman who had been dead for twenty years at the moment and who had experienced the depicted events. Thus, we gradually forget that this is a manuscript that is being read aloud, and Douglas, along with the original narrator, completely disappears from the reader's mind, and their place is occupied by the governess.
For Henry James the best narrative form was what N. Friedman called "the story told as if by a character in the story, but told in the third person" [3, p. 113].
G. Gennette refines this statement specifying what was meant by thisa focalized narration told by the narrator who is not a character himself, but accepts the character's point of view [8, p. 187]. Moreover, as Ann Heilmann remarked, in The Turn of the Screw we deal with "triangular first-person account, which moves from the unnamed frame narrator through Douglas to the governess" [4, p. 112].
So, we have three narrators of the story: the first narrator, Douglas and the governess. Considering the story level, the first narrator and Douglas are extradiegetic (as they are introducing the narrator of the main story) and the governess is intradiegetic (the one who tells the main story). According to the participation of the characters in the story they are telling, we also have both types of narrators: heterodiegetic (the first narrator and Douglas)not participating in the story, and homodiegetic (the governess)the participant of the story being told. At the same time Douglas is partly intradiegetic, as he reads the story from the manuscript to his friends aloud, and homodiegetic in relation to the first narrator who introduces him. The complex narrative composition of the novella (the first narrator tells about Douglas, who represents the diary notes of the governess, and she becomes the following narrator) demonstrates a shift from the third-person to the first-person narrator.

The Narrators Shifts in The Turn of the Screw
The first (initial) narrator (first-person) Douglas as the third-person narrator Douglas as the first-person narrator The governess as the third-person narrator The governess as the first-person narrator (the original narrator) As the governess is an intrahomodiegetic narrator, as well as an autodiegetic one (i.e. the narrator who is the protagonist of the narration), she is what W. Booth called "unreliable narrator", the type of a narrator that appeared in the 20th-century fiction as a result of rejecting the omniscient author. Kristen E. Elia states that for James the separation of narrator and author is crucial for his creation of narrative ambiguity [2, p. 2]. Indeed, if the story is mediated, the reader is not obliged to believe it. We tend to mistrust the governess not just because she is the direct participant of the story she tells, or because the story itself is mediated, but because she is too biased. Moreover, she is trying to project a strong bias onto the reader, to make the reader believe that the children are spoiled and haunted, as they respond fiercely and aggressively to her attempts to save them from the impending disaster. We are forced to see the whole story with the governess's eyes, and while her attitudes are firm, other characters' comments are very contradictory, which adds to the reader's doubt. In the conclusion we would like to emphasize the importance of analyzing the novellas and stories of Henry James, whose literary experiments were followed and developed by later authors and formed modernist literary tradition. James was one of the first major novelists who applied stream-of-consciousness techniques. Rethinking the role of the point of view for a story perception, he perfected an aesthetic approach that rejected a conventional omniscient narrator.
The Turn of the Screw might be a subject for the further study from the narrative and structural aspects, which will help to realise the author's intentions better and give a sound base for its analysis. We believe that a complex analysishistorical, stylistic, narrative and structuralwould be helpful in realising the author's intention in The Turn of the Screw.