The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contradiction in terms.

In the first, the narrator upgrade the words of a character, typically by offering a shorter, ameliorated version as a substitute for what would have been the character’s directly quoted speech in the second, the narrator downgrades, by offering a more obscure version as a substitute for what would have been the character’s directly quoted speech. Monitored speech takes two principal forms. Monitored speech thus refers to the equivalence relation that exists between directly quoted speech and the variety of speech paraphrase.

Indeed, this alternative explanation is preferable because it throws valuable light on an aspect of novelistic discourse that has remained remarkably undeveloped: the monitoring of the directly quoted speech of a particular character through the presentation of a substitute form. The passage in which Forster suggests that Lady Bertram is transformed from a flat into a round character is explicable, however, in terms other than those the English novelist proposes. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M Forster makes a distinction between round and flat characters that has achieved a certain celebrity.

Flat character english definition