Unreliable narrators: yay or nay? Or neigh? And if so, and you are a horse, how are you typing? - Edit 1
Before modification by Ghavrel at 12/03/2010 05:20:45 AM
Or reading?
But I digress. Which leads me back to my original point!
I've just started reading Gene Wolfe's Soldier in the Mist. The narrator, a Latin mercenary in the army of the late Cyrus the Younger, has short term memory loss. Think Memento meets the Anabasis, except that Memento came later and the Anabasis is arguably more obscure.
ANYWAY. The point is that, as in Memento, people who can't remember anything typically don't make for particularly reliable narrators. Even when they write/tattoo/condition everything as best they can. Now, Gene Wolfe seems to enjoy playing with the concept of reliability in narration; the narrator of his Book of the New Sun claims to have an eidetic memory, but several things within the book go against this claim.
It strikes me that the majority of genre fiction I've read does not deal a lot with this concept. Sci-fi and fantasy in particular. There seems to be a pretty strong belief that whatever is written is a true account, which is really rather odd considering how fairly cynical we humans can be as readers. I think it's safe to say that, on the whole, realistic fiction is more open about the possibility of the narrator misconstruing something. I don't mean in the sense of "Oh, we thought Xandar the Dark was on our side, but actually he was betraying us!", but rather in the sense of a narrator misremembering a scene or looking at an event and misinterpreting what's going on. Which leads me to my general questions.
1. Do you go into a novel with the assumption that the narrator will be reliable? Why?
2. Do you actively assess a narrator's reliability? Do you do it often? Are there triggers that make you stop and judge the narrator's reliability?
3. Do you prefer books with unreliable narrators? Why?
Feel free to hijack this into a discussion on reliability vs. unreliability, a critique on the concept of "realistic" vs "fantastic" fiction with regards to narrators' reliability (I'm looking at you, Larry), implicit misogyny in the assumption of certain narrative archetypes, etc.
But I digress. Which leads me back to my original point!
I've just started reading Gene Wolfe's Soldier in the Mist. The narrator, a Latin mercenary in the army of the late Cyrus the Younger, has short term memory loss. Think Memento meets the Anabasis, except that Memento came later and the Anabasis is arguably more obscure.
ANYWAY. The point is that, as in Memento, people who can't remember anything typically don't make for particularly reliable narrators. Even when they write/tattoo/condition everything as best they can. Now, Gene Wolfe seems to enjoy playing with the concept of reliability in narration; the narrator of his Book of the New Sun claims to have an eidetic memory, but several things within the book go against this claim.
It strikes me that the majority of genre fiction I've read does not deal a lot with this concept. Sci-fi and fantasy in particular. There seems to be a pretty strong belief that whatever is written is a true account, which is really rather odd considering how fairly cynical we humans can be as readers. I think it's safe to say that, on the whole, realistic fiction is more open about the possibility of the narrator misconstruing something. I don't mean in the sense of "Oh, we thought Xandar the Dark was on our side, but actually he was betraying us!", but rather in the sense of a narrator misremembering a scene or looking at an event and misinterpreting what's going on. Which leads me to my general questions.
1. Do you go into a novel with the assumption that the narrator will be reliable? Why?
2. Do you actively assess a narrator's reliability? Do you do it often? Are there triggers that make you stop and judge the narrator's reliability?
3. Do you prefer books with unreliable narrators? Why?
Feel free to hijack this into a discussion on reliability vs. unreliability, a critique on the concept of "realistic" vs "fantastic" fiction with regards to narrators' reliability (I'm looking at you, Larry), implicit misogyny in the assumption of certain narrative archetypes, etc.