In Chapter 8 there is a climax where Quentin and Shreve finally reveal the Sutpens' secret by means of a description of a conversation between Henry and Bon 46 years earlier (Absalom 285).4  In the description Bon tells Henry that he has Negro ancestry. However, as the careful reader realizes, the conversation has only been imagined by Quentin and Shreve. Why, then, do readers use this description as grounds to believe that Bon is "partly black", even though it is not stated in the novel to be true? 
     Some critics give us a hint to the answer to this question. The reliability of the description, for example, is mentioned by Dirk Kuyk Jr. when he observes, "no other passage in the book can attain greater reliability than this account, which confirms some important details and casts new light on others.... "(42). In the same way, Hugh M. Ruppersburg points out the description's "authoritative tone" when he says, "The episode reverberates with a more authoritative tone than the rest of the chapter...."(126). It seems therefore to be the "reliability" and "authoritative tone" of the description that make the readers believe that the conversation actually took place. 
     How, then, does this effect come about? Why does the description seem to be what really happened in the novel, even though it was in fact only imagined by two of the novel's characters? 
     When examining the narrative technique by which readers are kept unconscious of a narrator narrating the narrative, and in which the event narrated, whether fact or fiction, is reported as if it were what really happened, a look at the narrative technique in films is helpful. In the film Stage Fright (1950), Alfred Hitchcock uses an interesting trick that he calls "un flashback qui etait un mensonge" (Truffaut 188). In the opening scene of the movie, one major character looks back into the past, but at the end of the movie, this retrospective scene is revealed to be a lie. In one cinema, the audience actually got angry when they discovered that this retrospective scene had been in fact a lie. Regarding this episode James Monaco says, "They [audiences] weren't able to accept the possibility that the image would lie, although they would have been quite willing to believe that the character had lied. The image on the screen is simply invested with an immutable aura of validity. " (Monaco 173) This "validity" of film, which makes audiences consider the character's lie to be a fact, is similar to the "reliability" produced by the scene of Quentin and Shreve's conversation in Chapter 8 in which the readers are made to feel as if the events actually happened when in fact they were only created by the two characters.5  
     I would now like to consider how this validity, or reliability is realized in another film, The War of the Roses (1995). This film is in what is called 'nested-boxes style'. The primary narrative6 is about the lawyer Gavin and his client, a young man. The secondary narrative is about Gavin's friends, Mr. and Mrs. Rose. As to the narrative situation, in the opening and the ending of the film the character in the primary narrative, Gavin, tells his friends' story (the secondary narrative) to his client. In film it is the camera that produces the primary narrative frame; however, the audience are unconscious of the existence of the camera, because it does not exist in the narrative world as a narrator. The audience listen to the narrative told by the lawyer, the narrator of the secondary narrative, and watch him and his client through the lens of the camera. In this way, the audience are the narratees of the lawyer's story and on the same narrative level with him. 
     When Mr. and Mrs. Rose's story (the secondary narrative) begins, the lawyer, the narrator of the secondary narrative, disappears. The audience cannot see or hear him. Accordingly, the narrative discourse is made by not the secondary narrative narrator's (the lawyer's) voice, but by the story's characters', Mr. and Mrs. Rose's, voices. The audience feel as if they are watching before their eyes the secondary narrative's characters, Mr. and Mrs. Rose, talking to each other. The audience are on the same narrative level with Mr. and Mrs. Rose, not with the lawyer. It is impossible to think the lawyer saw and heard all of the story he tells, because he cannot have spent twenty-four hours a day with Mr. and Mrs. Rose, even if they were old friends. However, the audience do not consider that the story told by the lawyer has been made-up by him. As the secondary narrative about Mr. and Mrs. Rose is going on, the audience believe it is really happening. In The War of the Roses it can be said that it is the secondary narrative character's lines directly reaching the audience by the disappearance of the secondary narrative narrator, that makes the audience regard the past events, which are in fact only being told by the lawyer, as actual events that are taking place before their eyes. How, then, does the novel Absalom, Absalom! realize its "reliability" or "authoritative tone"?

     To examine how reliable the narrative of the novel is to readers, I would like to classify the narrative situations of Chapter 8 in Absalom, Absalom!, which includes Henry and Bon's conversation on the battlefield imagined by Quentin and Shreve, into two categories and six types. One category is whether the narrator is the External narrator,7  which is excluded from the primary narrative told by the narrator himself, or the primary narrative character. When the External narrator tells a narrative, the readers believe that the narrative discourse is true. When a character who does not always report a truth tells a story, on the other hand, the readers do not necessarily believe that this character's narrative discourse is true. The other category is whether the narrative is a narratized discourse, or a reported discourse in the form of the characters' dialogue. The reported discourse style gives the readers a stronger impression that the reported event really happened in the novel because the degree of the narrator's intrusion is lower in reported discourse than in narratized discourse.

     In this paper, I have attempted to make clear the reasons for the reliability of the narrative in the scene in chapter 8 where the secret of Bon's black parentage is told. First, and in reference to the secondary narrative narrator, it is important that the battlefield scene is not told by the voices of Quentin and Shreve, who should logically create the secondary narrative frame, and that the scene is not narrated from their perspectives. Finding no trace of the secondary narrative narrators, the readers think that the characters' words in the secondary narrative are being directly reported without any adaptation by Quentin and Shreve. 
     Next, as to the narrator of the primary narrative, it is important that the External narrator holds back completely from expressing his opinion, and that the External narrator by using the present tense, plays the role of a kind of a camera. Thoroughly disappearing of the External narrator in this way gives the reader the impression that the events being narrated are not being reported as in a story but are actually happening as they are being told. 
     In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner succeeds in making the readers feel as if the dialogue between Henry and Bon is a fact in the novel by creating two remarkable kinds of narrators. One is Quentin and Shreve, the characters in the primary narrative, who can easily disappear from the narrative discourse even though they are also the narrators (in the logical sense) of the secondary narrative. The other is the External narrator who not so much tells the story in the past in his own words, as simultaneously shows what is happening now. It is mainly by these remarkable narrative devices that Faulkner succeeds in making the readers believe Bon's black parentage to be a fact, even though there is no actual evidence in the novel to prove this 'fact.'