The Master and Margarita

by

Mikhail Bulgakov

The Master and Margarita: Unreliable Narrator 1 key example

Chapter 18. Hapless Visitors
Explanation and Analysis—This Truthful Narrative:

By the end of Book One in The Master and Margarita, so much has gone awry that sparrows dancing the foxtrot and a disappearing, fanged nurse in Professor Kuzmin’s office seem less like exceptions than the expectation. Closing Chapter 18, Bulgakov ironically ushers the reader into the work’s next section with verbal irony:

We do not know what other fantastical events took place in Moscow that night and, of course, we shall not try to search them out—especially since the time has come for us to go on to the second part of this truthful narrative. Follow me, reader!

The narrator’s insistence on his story’s “truthful[ness]” comes with an obvious touch of irony. Somewhat facetiously, Bulgakov appeals to the veracity of a patently fictional work. Rather, disappearing chervontsy and vodka-sipping tomcats may represent anything but the truth. The narrator takes pains to give his story a credibility that it does not actually bear, to the point where it strains his reliability. He declares himself the “author of these truth lines” and attacks rumors that embellish the “grain of truth.”

This repeated emphasis on authenticity continues to break the boundaries of fact and fiction. The Master and Margarita furnishes plenty of instances in which apparent madness overlaps with truth: Ivan Nikolayevich stumbles into Griboyedov’s hunting for Woland. Woland insists on the Devil’s existence, and Ha-Nozri preaches the inherent goodness of all men. As though following their lead, Bulgakov tests the reader’s own faith in him by fashioning himself as madman or prophet. He presents, within the story itself, a question of belief.