Re: Unreliable Narrators
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 15 Jun 1999 18:32:07 +1000
Scottie Bowman wrote:
> 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.
>
> I'd be more interested to hear examples of what
> the experts regard as a 'reliable' narrator.
Well, I guess you can only talk in terms of more reliable and less
reliable. I'd say Pip, or David Copperfield, or just about any of Dickens'
narrators are about as reliable as you can get. The way I see it,
`unreliable' means the narrators that give us the most reason to question
their perceptions of things. In the opening pages of Pale Fire, a scholarly
foreword has already disintergrated into a personal rant, thus we are
thinking `well, I'm not sure I should be trusting him'. Trust, yes. Trust
is the key word I think. For example, I trust Holden or Huck Finn as a
narrator, but I don't think I trust Humbert Humbert quite as much.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
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