Abstract: In the film BLACK SWAN, the protagonist Nina undergoes a character metamorphosis as she struggles to act out the roles of both the White Swan and the Black Swan in the ballet Swan Lake. In the process, she undergoes several instances of hallucinations which appears as real instances to the audience all through the movie. The movie has been shot entirely with the main narrator being Nina, though her narration takes place not as an interaction with the audience by means of conversations or as in narrating a story, but she manages to take along the audience with her throughout the act, deceiving them along the way. The movie "Black Swan" makes a phenomenal utilization of the classic narrative method known as the method of unreliable narration. The entire movie consists of unreliable narrators, whose roles are intertwined with the narration style that the protagonist Nina Sayers utilizes throughout the movie, making it difficult for the audience to understand who has been lying until the climax of the movie. The main objective of this study is to identify the techniques of unreliable narration used by the protagonist at different stages of her character metamorphosis throughout the movie. The analysis is conducted by means of a scenic interpretation of the movie.
Keywords: Unreliable Narration, Black Swan, Aronofsky, Nina Sayers, Narrator, Doppelganger, Ballet, Madman, Evil Twin.
Title: Unreliable Narration: An Analysis of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan
Author: Anjna Raj
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
Research Publish Journals
