Re: Unreliable Narrators

Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 07:38:35 -0400 

On Mon, Jun 14, 1999 at 08:39:33AM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:

>     It appears that the term 'unreliable narrator' is one
>     that all self-respecting American literateurs use with 
>     comfortable familiarity.  It keeps returning to this 
>     list like a familiar exam topic that all candidates 
>     would be wise to master.  It's not so familiar to me.
> 
>     I'd have thought that all first person narratives are,
>     by their nature, idiosyncratic, subjective & thereby 
>     'unreliable'.  We've had everything from Huck to 
>     Nick Carroway to the Larry of Razor's Edge cited 
>     as examples.

You're right that a first-person narrative is prone to distortion and
unreliability.  What the term refers to -- at least certainly in the
sense that I use it -- is related to irony.  The narrator tells us one
thing, but we, as readers, see something quite different.

Huck Finn speaks in terms of the southern environment in which he lives,
and appears to respect its tenets, and sometimes even believes he is
following the letter of the "law."  But when it comes time to betray
Jim, he makes a moral choice and says that even if it condemns him
forever, "then I'll go to hell."

Nick, in The Great Gatsby, is bedazzled by Gatsby's house, his crisp 
clothes, his air of being the worldly man of success, where to the
careful reader there are indications that there is something shady about
Jay Gatsby.  In Nick's eyes (and note the irony of the billboard of 
gigantic eyes advertising T.J. Eckleberg [I may have the spelling 
wrong, but forgive me; I haven't a copy of "Gatsby" at hand], Gatsby is 
an ideal, with a level of success that Nick imagines he will never 
attain.  But we see -- and eventually, so does Nick -- the truth 
behind Gatsby's brilliant creation of himself.  Until that time, though,
we see the story through Nick's deluded eyes, and we see through Gatsby
sooner, and more clearly.

I'm not sure if that clarifies it a bit, but in these quarters, those
are a couple of examples.  

--tim "old sport" o'connor