Flying from the enchanter : from narrative empathy to the questioning of narratorial reliability in A Man of the People

Readers and critics of Chinua Achebe’s novel 'A Man of the People' (1966) have invariably pilloried Chief Nanga, while they have generally been gushingly sympathetic to Odili Samalu by excessively praising, among other traits, his honesty as a character and his objectivity as a narrator. This paper seriously calls such sympathy and praises into question. From a narratological perspective, I argue that the scandalous bestowal of an 'undistorted view', a 'detached position' or a 'detached perspective' upon Odili is a normal effect of 'narrative empathy' which, however, can be only short-lived in the face of copious textually schematized clues of narratorial unreliability. These clues quell narrative empathy, elicit epistemological doubt from the (implied) reader, and alarm his/her cognitive mechanisms into the exercise of epistemic vigilance. I therefore withdraw the reliability badge from Odili, taking the stance that he is an unreliable narrator and that narratorial unreliability is intentionally encoded in the novel by the implied author as a stylistic device, i.e. for the purpose of generating irony.