Assess graduate students' ability to analyze how unreliable narration and focalization operate in late 20th–21st century literary fiction; students should identify narratorial types (homodiegetic/heterodiegetic), focalization patterns (internal/external, fixed/variable), and techniques (free indirect discourse, metafictional commentary, temporal disjunction), perform close readings of passages from contemporary texts, compare authors' uses to evaluate ethical, ideological, and reader-response effects, and employ narratological terminology to construct an evidence-based argument about how these devices shape characterization, narrative authority, and interpretive possibilities.