The Truth of Two Truths: Narrative Discontinuity in Fifth Business Katrina McGowan College

The narrative style and nature of Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business as presented through the perspective of main character Dunstan Ramsay creates a divide between his “objective truth” of the events of his life that he claims to tell and the “psychological truth” of these same events as revealed through motives and feelings unexplained by the conscious mind of Ramsay the narrator. Ramsay’s unconscious slippage of moral continuity in his narration provides answers to the unexplained motives and feelings of his conscious. This disconnect between his psychological truth and his objective truth is illustrated by linking patterns of guilt, jealousy, and insecurity that appear in his adult life back to events that occurred in the formative years of his childhood. These emotions, which are repressed for the sake of control, cause Dunstan’s subconscious to manifest within him and eventually grow more powerful and present in his life.

The difference between the “psychological truth” and the “objective truth”, in writing his memoir, Padre Blazon explains to Ramsay, is the answers that each perspective gives him. Ramsay is trying to determine Mary Dempster’s mythical identity and Blazon tells him he “must find his answer in psychological...