Scottie said: > I share your curiosity about reliable narrators. > > I've no idea if Wayne Booth was the originator > of the concept but from its current prevalence on > many literary lists I take it to be the most chic > thing going. I have a funny feeling that Will shall (*) know better than I about the history of the technique of the unreliable narrator, but one of the more etched-in-stone such characters is Mark Twain's Huck Finn, and at least some of the narrators of Stephen Crane's stories qualify, too. If time permits (I have an article that is sorely past deadline & so may not have the luxury to look), (*) NOTE: it is interesting to come up with ways of using Will's name in sentences that have verbs of the future tense (e.g., "Will will"), and I suspect I note that only because it's in some way amusing, at least to me in my virtual padded cell. Even Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby, is in some aspects a classic case -- we can't be sure whether his infatuation with, or loathing of, the various characters colors his narrative. From what I recall, Ring Lardner also used to like playing with narrators who told the reader one thing, while the reader could see something quite different. And Kafka's narrators need always to be viewed through the lenses of paranoia and terror and self-loathing. (Last year, someone here in the U.S. released a short movie called "Franz Kafka's 'It's a Wonderful Life,'" which conflated a non-fiction imagination of the composition of "The Metamorphosis" with Frank Capra's Christmas fable, and the various points of view were dizzying and hilarious.) I found one quick source that might be interesting, and it even appears to be on my local library shelf: AUTHOR : Riggan, William, 1946- TITLE : Picaros, madmen, naifs, and clowns : the unreliable first-person narrator / by William Riggan. EDITION : 1st ed. PUBLISHER : Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, c1981. DESCRIPTION : x, 206 p. ; 22 cm. SUBJECT(S) : First person narrative >From the current American perspective, it's funny to consider Scottie's remark about this being the "most chic thing going," since some of us here in the U.S. would argue at least with a small amount of vigor that we here get plenty of unreliable "narration" in our daily diet of news, which on occasion resembles fiction. Certainly in New York City, one can pick any major urban story and compare its coverage in the three major daily papers for a dose in narrative variation. A news piece may come out deeply slanted in one, comic in another, and scarcely noteworthy in a third. So it's not just fiction involved! --tim