“I Will Unfold A Tale—!”: Narrative, Epistemology, and Caleb Williams

Abstract

From beginning to end, Caleb Williams interrogates the construction of narrative, thereby raising a central problem of empiricism: are the stories we tell about the world true? Evaluating William Godwin's novel in terms of its complex relationship to genre situates its critique of narrative squarely in the middle of contemporaneous philosophical debates. The novel is in conversation with an empiricist philosophy that would value coherent narratives above all else. These narratives, the novel suggests, are not only artificial but also epistemologically dangerous. Ultimately, they encourage us to accept what is reasonable at the expense of what may be true. According to the novel, it is not merely true that narrative is an ineffective mechanism for explaining the world, but that the very debate over Enlightenment questions is unstable.