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The Preface
Explanation and Analysis—The Unnamed Editor:
From the start of the novel, Defoe makes it clear that the unnamed editor who has worked with Moll to tell her story is an unreliable narrator, meaning that what they present as true in Moll’s “autobiography” may not necessarily be true. In the Preface, this unnamed editor communicates the following:
The Pen employ’d in finishing her Story, and making it what you now see it to be, has had no little difficulty to put it into a Dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak Language fit to be read: When a Woman debauch’d from her Youth, nay, even being the Off-spring of Debauchery and Vice, comes to give an Account of all her vicious Practises […] an Author must be hard put to it to wrap it up so clean, as not to give room, especially for vicious Readers to turn it to his Disadvantage.
Related Themes:
