This dissertation identifies a class of literary and cinematic narratives that has hitherto been neglected by critics—what I call "narratives of deception." These are stories preoccupied with deception as a theme, and as an event seen through the eyes of the deceiver's victim. They tend toward tragic seriousness, and are told in such a way that the reader, like the tricked protagonist, does not learn of the ruse until it is "too late." Whereas previous scholarship has focused on well-defined genres—the detective story, the spy thriller, the trickster tale, the picaresque—my project carves out new categories, concentrating on the readerly and real-life experience of being deceived. Such texts demand our attention because they fulfill an essential function as "social honor stories," enabling Western audiences to confront their anxieties about fraud and betrayal.

Different types of deception narratives elicit different emotional and cognitive responses from the reader. Here I scrutinize works belonging to three such sub-types, examining how they achieve their effects and what insights they yield about the pleasures and pains of being cheated.

The first chapter considers Vladimir Nabokov's novella The Eye , David Mamet's film House of Games (1987), and Flannery O'Connor's short story "Good Country People." All three texts compel the reader, in different ways, to feel humiliated on behalf of the protagonists, who in falling victim to fraud discover a painful gap between their perceived and real selves. In the second chapter I examine Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner (1997) and O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," two texts which infect the reader with suspicion and investigate the potential foreseeability of a deceit. Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls is the focus of the last chapter. I show that Gogol's ironic narration enacts a double deception, facetiously occluding the acts of dishonesty and corruption which Chichikov and the novel's other characters casually commit. Moreover, since ironic narration presupposes and rewards a "mistrustful" reader, while implicitly ridiculing the gullible reader who takes the narrator's statements at face value, I argue that all rhetorical irony is a call to vigilance against possible fraud.