The Naive Reader

[flemmings]

Have I ever said how much I dislike unreliable narrators? I really really do. I'm quite happy for visual media to pull switches on me, possibly because I really don't care whether you met last year in Marienbad or not, possibly because the visual is always open to question anyway. Am perfectly happy for a film or manga scene to be an unmarked hallucination or a flashback or a dream: the narrative thrust is not the main reason for watching a film or reading a manga.

But in prose narration it gets up my nose just a touch, only mitigated a little by other people's guesses as to what really might have happened. (Or by my own imperviousness: I had no idea Ishiguro's narrator in An Artist of the Floating World was at all unreliable.) The word must be trustable or how can we tell where we are? Agreed, I only feel this way because of prose conventions, but conventions count for a lot. People who arbitrarily break the rules of murder mysteries annoy me too. If a narrator lies consistently, I want at least to be able to construct the facts. If the facts are beyond construction, as they are in Liar, I become anxious.

I also can't conceive of writing a book like Liar *without* a Received Version at hand. If the writer herself doesn't know what really happened, how can she maintain any kind of consistency in the narrator's departure from it? And if it doesn't matter-- if readers really can pick the reality they choose from the facts available-- why bother? It's like a whodunit that doesn't say who did-- an exercise in pointlessness.

Comments

[incandescens]

I don't mind a slightly unreliable narrator as long as there's a clue in the text that they are an unreliable narrator, either through mistake or misperception. As you say, I do also require there to be a real set of events. I wouldn't want the author shrugging about it.

[unearthly-calm.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading An Artist and A Pale View of Hills recently and like them both. I can see how one might find unreliable narrators frustrating, but I quite enjoy them. I feel like they make me work harder to figure out what is true and what isn't, which I enjoy. (Utena gave me the same feeling.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Utena was wonderful that way, but it was visual and surrealistic-- an explanation for a lot of stuff isn't needed because no rational explanation of Nanami the Cow is possible. Must be metaphor or dream or simple fantasy: you simply can't take it at surface level. Artist and Pale Hills I accepted at face value (just noticed what an odd phrase that is) without question; the tip-offs, whatever they might have been, were too subtle for me to notice.