A Reliable Narrator

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, possibly. It's written in the second person and therefore assumes no gap between narrator and reader. Visit my blog: http://whatisthisstrangeplace.blogspot.com/

I respond to your challenge by saying: subjectivity does not equal unreliability The unreliable narrator has very specific uses - I mean, if we want to be nitpicky about it, then the third-person narrator of the Hobbit (Bilbo) was later revealed to be 'unreliable' when Tolkien revised it, claiming that Bilbo had originally been bewitched by the ring and so had played down its evil in his account. And you know, narrators omit things for the purposes of narrative relevance. So either we go all Jorge Luis Borges and say every story falls short of some absolute standard of truth, or we agree that, for our purposes, the unreliable narrator is characterised by one whose point of view runs contrary to the message or theme of the book. And I'd say Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is *not* an unreliable narrator, despite being fucked.

I'd agree with Tim that the 'Unreliable Narrator' is a specific device where we're supposed to know that the narrator is lying, or bending the truth, and see right through them, rather than simply a narrator who is not a keeper of absolute truth. However, 'Is there a Reliable Narrator' is a slightly different question, and I don't think their agreeing with the spirit of the book makes them immediately reliable. Pip in Great Expectations is not an Unreliable Narrator, but I wouldn't say he's a Reliable Narrator. He's simply someone we're supposed to trust, because the novel is more concerned with *his account* of his life than it is with what actually happened. A neat example of this is when the matter of his punishment for criminal activities is completely skirted over/avoided because the internal morality of the tale requires a reward instead. So Pip, like this bawdy Duke fellow, is probably unreliable, and yet the reader is invited to trust them. To take them as Unreliable Narrators would be to ask too much of the story, I feel. You'd be trying to see through them into a fiction that has not actually been created.

I feel a comment coming re the Cartesian subjective nature of truth and reality... Are we not all the unreliable narrators of our lives? ...or something... :-) * P * :-)

I was thinking about this the other day, Lord Of The Rings is written to feel more like a history than a novel, with appendices and numerous spurious details. Abliet the sort of medieval history Tolkein was used to reading so still not exactly a reliable academic text. American Tabloid by James Elroy is peppered with wiretap transcripts and newspaper cuttings that make it feel more like a report from a congressional sub-comitee and effectively provide evidence to back up the narrator, proving his reliability. These are no more devices to help the reader suspend disbelief, but they do sort of enforce a reliability on the narrator. Similarly stories written in frames, like Heart of Darkness or The Turn Of The Screw, could be considered reliable, because they only relate to the telling of a tale, not the tale itself.