Re: Unreliable Narrators

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It's funny that this subject should come up, as I've just spent the past
weekend laboring over, er, reading Faulkner's _The Sound and the Fury_.
(Truly the most fascinating study on viewpoint that I've ever read.)

>From the idiot Benjy to the tortured Quentin to the angry Jason, the reader
gets Caddy's tragic story from each of her brothers' viewpoints until at
last Faulkner the narrator steps in to "clarify" things.  Faulkner has said
in interviews that this could have been his masterpiece - that he tried to
tell this story and didn't get it right the first time with Benjy, so he
tried with Quentin, then Jason, then at last he tried to step in and
complete the story by switching to third person and still he couldn't get it
right.  He felt that it was his ultimate failure because he tried to tell
the same story four different times, with four different viewpoints and
failed each time.

I should fail so well.

But as to Scottie's question, I thought about all the first person
narratives that I've ever read and all of them have the same difficulty.
The only narrative, I think, that may avoid this is Benjy's section of _The
Sound and the Fury_.  Because Benjy cannot make judgements, cannot
understand what he is missing, his story is simply the accurate playback of
events as witnessed by someone who did not understand them.

Sure, it's the most obscured, but it's probably the most truthful
representation of the true story.  It is up to me, the reader, to separate
the chaff of Benjy's imaginings from the rest to get to the true story.
Because Benjy cannot distort events with what he wants to have happened, he
can only remember that which he does not understand.

Understand?

Regards,
Cecilia.

-----Original Message-----
 
On Mon, 14 Jun 1999 08:39:33 +0100 Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie>
writes:
>    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.
>
>    I'd be more interested to hear examples of what 
>    the experts regard as a 'reliable' narrator.
>
>    Scottie B.
>

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