1 00:00:10,100 --> 00:00:11,180 OK, great. 2 00:00:11,180 --> 00:00:18,290 OK, to start with an apology, this is not quite the lecture on unreliable narration that I was planning that it would be I started to work on it, 3 00:00:18,290 --> 00:00:26,750 on good in good time last week. And then an improbable series of disasters ensued, the first of which was that I got a rare form of hay fever. 4 00:00:26,750 --> 00:00:33,110 I never get hay fever and streaming. I made it actually quite hard to read the texts that I wanted to write about. 5 00:00:33,110 --> 00:00:39,950 Then, of course, I wanted to write about in a Book of Pale Fire, and I discovered that my heavily annotated edition, 6 00:00:39,950 --> 00:00:43,880 annotated by myself in pencil in the margins I had lent to a student. 7 00:00:43,880 --> 00:00:53,360 I'd forgotten this some three years ago, a student who was proposing to write a PhD as a line by line marginal annotation of Nabokov's Pale Fire. 8 00:00:53,360 --> 00:00:56,750 And I thought this was a worthy project, so I gladly lent the copy. 9 00:00:56,750 --> 00:01:02,120 But I think three years is quite a long line, and my suspicion is that that student has now gone to another university, 10 00:01:02,120 --> 00:01:08,030 has started writing that Ph.D. is possibly using my pencil annotations without attribution. 11 00:01:08,030 --> 00:01:13,490 So I made a note to myself to actually look at dissertation abstracts UK to see whether that's taken place. 12 00:01:13,490 --> 00:01:17,270 And instead I went to the English Faculty Library to borrow their copy. 13 00:01:17,270 --> 00:01:25,670 Now their copy impressively is signed both by Nabokov, his wife Vera and their son Dmitri, 14 00:01:25,670 --> 00:01:29,540 which is highly unusual because Dmitri famously disapproved of his father's works. 15 00:01:29,540 --> 00:01:30,680 And then what did I find? 16 00:01:30,680 --> 00:01:38,030 That the English faculty library, which I had not previously been aware, is run by crypto communists, the staff who were on strike. 17 00:01:38,030 --> 00:01:41,210 So I can borrow that copy either. And in any case, my headache was getting worse. 18 00:01:41,210 --> 00:01:44,300 So I thought that I would give up on this project and go home and work from there. 19 00:01:44,300 --> 00:01:49,100 I had other books that I could refer to, of course, and then a few other things happened. 20 00:01:49,100 --> 00:01:55,100 I live on the street a little bit. Down the way is a joke shop and this joke shop got broken into. 21 00:01:55,100 --> 00:01:58,940 The burglar alarm was set off. It went on and on and on. 22 00:01:58,940 --> 00:02:06,350 And this made my headache worse. The police took a long time to write and before the police and whoever was going to be turning off the alarm arrived. 23 00:02:06,350 --> 00:02:15,890 Somebody threw a brick through my window. It landed on my desk, bounced off it, grazed the corner of my laptop and landed in my glass of hay fever. 24 00:02:15,890 --> 00:02:24,260 Remedy on this note, sorry, on this break was attached a note and it was one word concentrate. 25 00:02:24,260 --> 00:02:29,870 And so I did. How do we know that narrative is unreliable? 26 00:02:29,870 --> 00:02:36,590 It arises from the impression that we are not the reader desired by the narrator. 27 00:02:36,590 --> 00:02:41,150 The desired reader is not only competent to understand it through, for example, 28 00:02:41,150 --> 00:02:46,760 understanding the language in which it's written and knowing enough about the subjects concerned, 29 00:02:46,760 --> 00:02:52,070 but is also sympathetic to its perspectives and trusting in its facts. 30 00:02:52,070 --> 00:02:57,890 A feeling of discomfort arises when there is a distance between the actual and the implied. 31 00:02:57,890 --> 00:03:07,250 Reader is large, and especially when you are aware that the implied reader is not one that you want any more closely to resemble. 32 00:03:07,250 --> 00:03:11,870 So, for example, reading the sections of Mein Kampf which concern Jews, 33 00:03:11,870 --> 00:03:19,640 I can see the logical contradictions and sinister implications which the implied reader would not and which I do not wish 34 00:03:19,640 --> 00:03:26,690 to lose sight of except in order to perform the thought experiment of understanding those who are influenced by it. 35 00:03:26,690 --> 00:03:35,600 But Mein Kampf is a work of rhetoric. It seeks to persuade and addresses itself to a greater spectrum of readers than those who would finish it. 36 00:03:35,600 --> 00:03:43,520 Wholly convinced, a reader's sense of distance from the implied reader is always more uncomfortable in 37 00:03:43,520 --> 00:03:49,670 cases where the presence from beginning to end of the implied reader is actually assumed. 38 00:03:49,670 --> 00:03:55,100 No attempt is made to persuade of the author's perspective because no one is thought necessary. 39 00:03:55,100 --> 00:04:00,290 One could take the example of the transcript of a 17th century witch trial, 40 00:04:00,290 --> 00:04:05,960 which assumes Alyx readers a belief in the existence of which is the necessity for their 41 00:04:05,960 --> 00:04:11,270 punishment and the justice of the trial through which they are put from such a text. 42 00:04:11,270 --> 00:04:22,550 A post 17th century reader is likely to feel a greater sense of detachment than from any work which rhetorically serves an argument which she rejects. 43 00:04:22,550 --> 00:04:28,280 But Mein Kampf and the transcript of the witch trial are not what is commonly meant 44 00:04:28,280 --> 00:04:34,250 by unreliable narration because a further element is necessary to that concept. 45 00:04:34,250 --> 00:04:43,280 That is, that certain elements in the text strongly suggest that certain other elements in the text are to be distrusted. 46 00:04:43,280 --> 00:04:55,260 Specifically, the narrative voice is undermined by features of the text, which that narrative voice produces factually, ethically or both. 47 00:04:55,260 --> 00:05:04,670 A narrator suggested to be contemptible. Lt might tell one the truth like John Self in Martin Amis novel Money, 48 00:05:04,670 --> 00:05:14,990 one suggested to be good might understand less than the reader about what is occurring, like Olive Goldsmith's vicar of Wakefield. 49 00:05:14,990 --> 00:05:21,770 But it is not repeat to repeat enough that a critique can be made of the assumptions of the narrator. 50 00:05:21,770 --> 00:05:34,130 See if any of you know where this is from. A total like figure in an olive green uniform which bore a single red ribbon of the order of Lenin, 51 00:05:34,130 --> 00:05:39,750 came into the room and walked with quick, short steps over to the desk. 52 00:05:39,750 --> 00:05:48,820 And we to. Feel free to interrupt. General Gee looked up and waved to the nearest chair at the conference table. 53 00:05:48,820 --> 00:05:55,780 Good evening, comrade. The squat face split into a sugary smile. 54 00:05:55,780 --> 00:06:09,290 Good evening, comrade general. The head of to the Department of Smash in charge of operations and execution's hitched up her skirts and sat down. 55 00:06:09,290 --> 00:06:12,290 This is orchestrated for maximum effect, 56 00:06:12,290 --> 00:06:21,350 the effect relies on the assumptions that neither heads of intelligence organisations nor people with total figures and squat faces are women. 57 00:06:21,350 --> 00:06:29,390 The overturning of these expectations aims at generating surprise combined with amusement and intensified disgust at the squat figure, 58 00:06:29,390 --> 00:06:33,560 which is the more repellent by virtue of belonging to female. 59 00:06:33,560 --> 00:06:42,880 What I've just been doing in the last two sentences was made a feminist critique of the narrator, which receives no endorsement within the novel. 60 00:06:42,880 --> 00:06:51,480 No. Thank you. Which is therefore not unreliably, narrated in the conventional sense of that term, 61 00:06:51,480 --> 00:06:55,290 the American critic Wayne S. Booth gave the following half a definition, 62 00:06:55,290 --> 00:07:00,480 which is a quotation one for those of you who have got handouts, they will be on Leblon. 63 00:07:00,480 --> 00:07:07,080 I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work, 64 00:07:07,080 --> 00:07:14,510 which is to say, the implied author's norms, unreliable when he does not. 65 00:07:14,510 --> 00:07:26,990 The implied author is another is another concept which bears Booth's stamp, he makes what I find a helpful distinction between the SBP, 66 00:07:26,990 --> 00:07:33,680 the flesh and blood person, on the one hand, the implied author on another I shouldn't have brought. 67 00:07:33,680 --> 00:07:44,140 Hanson is three and the narrator. For example, Atonement by Ian McEwan is written by the male FPP Ian McEwan, 68 00:07:44,140 --> 00:07:51,820 born in Hampshire in nineteen forty eight, he is like every one of us, infinitely complex. 69 00:07:51,820 --> 00:07:59,420 But we can infer certain things about him from his authorship of this historical Second World War novel. 70 00:07:59,420 --> 00:08:07,430 He or she, and we can't tell which it is from the novel alone, seems to know a fair bit about English literature and about which kind of English 71 00:08:07,430 --> 00:08:12,660 literature was being read in Cambridge by undergraduates in the nineteen thirties. 72 00:08:12,660 --> 00:08:19,790 He or she is prepared to spend several hundred pages dwelling on a woman tormented by guilt for a childhood crime and 73 00:08:19,790 --> 00:08:26,660 is prepared to spring a major narrative twist on the reader and has considerable skill with the English language. 74 00:08:26,660 --> 00:08:35,240 All of these things have to be true of the FPP and also of the implied author. 75 00:08:35,240 --> 00:08:41,720 But in addition, the implied author has certain opinions. 76 00:08:41,720 --> 00:08:49,910 He considers that the British retreat from Dunkirk was a shambles, as it is represented by the novel things, 77 00:08:49,910 --> 00:08:54,950 that it is wrong to maliciously accuse someone of rape and considers it appropriate that 78 00:08:54,950 --> 00:08:59,810 someone who has done this should spend the rest of their lives tormented by guilt. 79 00:08:59,810 --> 00:09:06,260 In other words, McEwan has to know and do the things we find in the novel in order to have written it. 80 00:09:06,260 --> 00:09:12,470 But he doesn't have to share the implied author's values, maybe privately. 81 00:09:12,470 --> 00:09:21,140 Ian McEwan considers that the retreat from Dunkirk was in fact a rather glorious moment for the British with their with their little boats. 82 00:09:21,140 --> 00:09:28,100 But he thought perhaps that this novel would find greater favour amongst his readership if it embraced revisionism. 83 00:09:28,100 --> 00:09:36,680 We can't know for sure. And finally, we have his narrator who we discover in the final section is Briony Tallis, 84 00:09:36,680 --> 00:09:41,510 who up to this point has been one of the characters in the novel being narrated in the third person. 85 00:09:41,510 --> 00:09:52,880 So sorry to anybody who hasn't yet read it or seen the film. So the FPP Ian McEwan has created a fictional FPP who was written a novelist, 86 00:09:52,880 --> 00:10:01,660 testimony from which another implied author, Brian italicise implied author, can be extrapolated. 87 00:10:01,660 --> 00:10:14,620 But from what we can find out and deduce about McKewon Tallis and their respective implied authors, all four of them are very largely in accord. 88 00:10:14,620 --> 00:10:22,990 Admittedly, a famous critic thought to be so, Colonie occasionally criticises the style of Telesis opening section as pretentious. 89 00:10:22,990 --> 00:10:32,110 This opens up a slight difference between Briony DBP and the implied author of that section of the novel. 90 00:10:32,110 --> 00:10:41,230 Also, Bryony's novel, her testament dates at the end from fact as she herself confesses. 91 00:10:41,230 --> 00:10:48,910 But she justifies this as a kindness to her lovers and the reader to let them survive and love the actual FPP. 92 00:10:48,910 --> 00:11:00,370 McEwan presumably justifies this and the subsequent revelation of the narrator's unreliability as part of a moving examination of guilt and grief. 93 00:11:00,370 --> 00:11:04,430 That's the biggest difference between them, and it's not that great. 94 00:11:04,430 --> 00:11:15,130 In other words, had Briony Tallis not committed a crime when she was 13, you can well imagine her having grown up to write the novel Atonement. 95 00:11:15,130 --> 00:11:22,680 You may not like her. You may not agree with her perspective on guilt, but the novel doesn't dislike her. 96 00:11:22,680 --> 00:11:31,950 The FPP critic myself, I'm not quite sure that I made that absolutely clear, but you have to take my word for that uncertainty. 97 00:11:31,950 --> 00:11:37,920 All you know is that the implied critique being constructed by the FBB that is me thinks that. 98 00:11:37,920 --> 00:11:44,730 And perhaps you've already had reason to distrust that. There were many cases which are clearer than atonement. 99 00:11:44,730 --> 00:11:52,020 A fairly good recent example is Sebastian Faulks novel Ingleby published in 2007. 100 00:11:52,020 --> 00:11:55,420 Anybody read this? OK, very few. 101 00:11:55,420 --> 00:12:02,870 All right, and you'll be structured as the diary of a young man through his time studying English at Cambridge University. 102 00:12:02,870 --> 00:12:07,960 If you want a bit of self reflexive fiction, a bit of a historical kind. Go ahead. 103 00:12:07,960 --> 00:12:12,550 So although I am about to give away the plot, I'm afraid he's studying English at Cambridge University. 104 00:12:12,550 --> 00:12:18,280 And and then we go on with his diary to him working as a journalist in London after he's graduated. 105 00:12:18,280 --> 00:12:21,220 He's well read and he's very clever. 106 00:12:21,220 --> 00:12:29,890 He's also contemptuous of most things, most people, his university, his course, the study of English literature and so on. 107 00:12:29,890 --> 00:12:37,360 He's strongly attracted to a fellow student called Jennifer. He spends a lot of his time on his own driving to rural pubs. 108 00:12:37,360 --> 00:12:43,420 I know them around Cambridge, engaging in shoplifting and taking nameless drugs. 109 00:12:43,420 --> 00:12:49,400 Here's an example of his style quotation to describing the road system around Basingstoke. 110 00:12:49,400 --> 00:12:53,960 The town seethed like lockdown within its concentric ring roads. 111 00:12:53,960 --> 00:13:00,290 I followed the signs for the centre, but after I'd spent 15 minutes obediently going where the signs told me, 112 00:13:00,290 --> 00:13:08,830 they had brought me back to where I'd begun. The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, 113 00:13:08,830 --> 00:13:13,090 I didn't know that T.S. Eliot had been on the Basingstoke Urban District Council. 114 00:13:13,090 --> 00:13:17,920 Highways ring roads and Street Furniture Committee Micas satirical. 115 00:13:17,920 --> 00:13:23,020 He knows as T.S. Eliot, some readers will find this somewhat juvenile and pretentious. 116 00:13:23,020 --> 00:13:32,080 I say some flesh and blood readers are various English readers belonging to a relatively anti intellectual country 117 00:13:32,080 --> 00:13:38,800 are likely to have a lower pretentious pretentiousness threshold than the readers of some other countries. 118 00:13:38,800 --> 00:13:44,020 Also, some behave in ways that others would describe as juvenile and pretentious, 119 00:13:44,020 --> 00:13:48,490 and perhaps some of those would find my exploration purely witty and erudite. 120 00:13:48,490 --> 00:13:51,460 But the number of flesh and blood readers who, 121 00:13:51,460 --> 00:14:03,430 like Mike is likely to diminish as the novel goes on to a circle of readers who more and more resemble Mike himself beyond the question of approval. 122 00:14:03,430 --> 00:14:11,210 However, there's also the question of trust. Certain details of Mike's narration contradict his analysis of them. 123 00:14:11,210 --> 00:14:16,720 He claims to have many friends, for example, but as I say, he spends most of his time on his own. 124 00:14:16,720 --> 00:14:22,480 It's clear that his fellow students keep an arm's length from him and they the 125 00:14:22,480 --> 00:14:27,700 other students don't emerge as people wholly without judgement of character. 126 00:14:27,700 --> 00:14:36,340 Minor provocation sent into his blue pills and inaccurate comments about a music band throws them into such a fury that he wakes up, 127 00:14:36,340 --> 00:14:43,390 as he tells us, in the psychiatric ward. On one occasion, my own diagnosis of the problem is simple, he explains. 128 00:14:43,390 --> 00:14:49,690 It's that I share 50 percent of my genome with a banana and ninety eight percent with a chimpanzee. 129 00:14:49,690 --> 00:14:55,960 Bananas don't do psychological consistency and the tiny part of us that's different. 130 00:14:55,960 --> 00:15:01,600 The special Homo sapiens bit is faulty. It doesn't work. 131 00:15:01,600 --> 00:15:10,770 Sorry about that. Voiced by another narrator, this might be witty and wise and suggest a correspondingly witty and wise implied author, 132 00:15:10,770 --> 00:15:13,440 but in the context of the rest of Mike's narration, 133 00:15:13,440 --> 00:15:23,530 it acquires worryingly direct pertinently to Mike himself, suggesting his fault in us at least as much as it confirms his Homo sapiens. 134 00:15:23,530 --> 00:15:32,310 One day, Jennifer aforementioned goes missing. The last time Mike saw her was the night before when he gave her a lift home. 135 00:15:32,310 --> 00:15:38,370 He follows the colleges and the police's attempts to find her, and when this fails, the attempt to find her. 136 00:15:38,370 --> 00:15:45,060 And when this failed attempt to find her assumed murderer, he graduates and becomes a journalist. 137 00:15:45,060 --> 00:15:49,020 Finally, he himself becomes the object of a police investigation. 138 00:15:49,020 --> 00:15:56,070 Years later, he is in the end arrested and delivered to a secure psychiatric ward and gives the account now, 139 00:15:56,070 --> 00:16:03,320 which up to this point he suppressed of what occurred on the night in which he gave Jennifer a lift. 140 00:16:03,320 --> 00:16:08,840 At some stage in this process, the reader understands that Mike killed her. 141 00:16:08,840 --> 00:16:14,570 The location of this stage will vary greatly between different readers. 142 00:16:14,570 --> 00:16:20,960 A reading involving early suspicion of Mike is perhaps not necessarily the best reading. 143 00:16:20,960 --> 00:16:30,530 It might result from a predilection for four such novels and an expectation that the readers pact of trust with the narrator is going to be broken. 144 00:16:30,530 --> 00:16:36,350 Or it might stem from a particularly strong aversion to Mike's brand of intellectual snobbery. 145 00:16:36,350 --> 00:16:42,830 To the extent of making a juvenile quota of Elliott obviously seem capable of murder more positively. 146 00:16:42,830 --> 00:16:52,080 The reader might be skilled in psychiatry and pick up on Mike's mode of narration of the physical and psychological abuse which he suffered at school. 147 00:16:52,080 --> 00:16:55,640 Or she might have read his previous novel, Human Traces, 148 00:16:55,640 --> 00:17:03,560 about the early development of psychiatry and be sensitised to signs of mental instability and forces writing. 149 00:17:03,560 --> 00:17:11,120 Still, the reader implied by the text has to at some point accept that they've been in the company of a self deluded narrator 150 00:17:11,120 --> 00:17:17,570 who's admitted to narrate one of the most crucial events of the novel and is not approved of by the novel as a whole. 151 00:17:17,570 --> 00:17:26,300 Mike Ingleby himself, who is actually not a bad literary critic, would be forced to read that novel in such a way, 152 00:17:26,300 --> 00:17:31,410 even if he had more sympathy with the protagonist than did most readers or folks who, 153 00:17:31,410 --> 00:17:36,620 in an interview after publication, described NLB as a [INAUDIBLE]. 154 00:17:36,620 --> 00:17:44,270 It is possible to construct films on a similar principle. The two thousand film Memento, which is based on a short story, 155 00:17:44,270 --> 00:17:48,200 is partly told through the perspective of the protagonist who's trying to avenge 156 00:17:48,200 --> 00:17:52,520 the murder of his wife but is suffering from a disease which affects his memory. 157 00:17:52,520 --> 00:17:55,140 As the viewer is vulnerable to his perspective, 158 00:17:55,140 --> 00:18:03,260 she sees the events as he does without the context necessary to interpret them until gradually a different picture emerges. 159 00:18:03,260 --> 00:18:12,770 I think, Mike, NLB typifies one kind of unreliable narrator, a one class of unreliable narrator, which could be called the young male. 160 00:18:12,770 --> 00:18:24,110 This kind of narrators use correlates to a relatively limited perspective, and this in combination with their maleness to a certain type of arrogance. 161 00:18:24,110 --> 00:18:28,550 This can be found in works even by relatively young males. 162 00:18:28,550 --> 00:18:33,680 The Rachel Papers was written by Martin Amis when he was twenty four and is narrated 163 00:18:33,680 --> 00:18:39,230 by a man on the eve of his 20th birthday describing his life over the previous year. 164 00:18:39,230 --> 00:18:47,900 Like Mike Ingleby, Charles Highway studies, English literature is bright, neurotic and despises most people. 165 00:18:47,900 --> 00:18:56,660 The situations in which he involves himself often make him look ridiculous, and his descriptions of the world are often limited by his narcissism. 166 00:18:56,660 --> 00:19:05,270 However, he is factually reliable and no murderer. His account of the woman he wants, with whom he eventually has sex demonstrates an overweight, 167 00:19:05,270 --> 00:19:13,550 overweening male ego and wit from which the novel as a whole distances itself only to a very limited degree. 168 00:19:13,550 --> 00:19:23,450 Beyond this, any given reader might want to laugh more with him than at him, whereas another, who is possibly more likely to be female, 169 00:19:23,450 --> 00:19:29,210 is suspended between pity for the narrator dislike of the implied author who does not condemn 170 00:19:29,210 --> 00:19:36,810 him more and transferred dislike of the flesh and blood author who created that implied author. 171 00:19:36,810 --> 00:19:40,710 Something of the same is true of Jadi Sound as Holden Caulfield. 172 00:19:40,710 --> 00:19:43,830 NARRATOR and protagonist of a Catcher in the Rye. 173 00:19:43,830 --> 00:19:55,930 Now this protagonist lacks the intelligence of NLB or highway, but shares that neurotic contempt for most people and NLB solitariness and instability. 174 00:19:55,930 --> 00:20:03,240 He's expelled from school for poor performance, runs away from his family as a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, 175 00:20:03,240 --> 00:20:08,850 gets beaten up, nearly runs off with his sister and finally accepts that he's sick. 176 00:20:08,850 --> 00:20:16,320 Like NLB, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. But unlike him, he has become a hero and icon for generations of teenagers. 177 00:20:16,320 --> 00:20:22,770 They are not misreading the text. It is possible for a narrator to be very young, naive, self-destructive, 178 00:20:22,770 --> 00:20:30,240 destructive and arrogant and for sympathy for him not to be prohibited by that text's rhetoric. 179 00:20:30,240 --> 00:20:37,980 Perhaps the same is true of Alex ultraviolent teenage narrator Vancity Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. 180 00:20:37,980 --> 00:20:47,790 He's far more dangerous even than Mike, but is more verbally dextrous and to this reader, at least more charismatic than any of the above. 181 00:20:47,790 --> 00:20:52,680 Finally, I would add to the protagonist of a play, Stephen Jeffries's The Libertine, 182 00:20:52,680 --> 00:20:58,590 based on the life of the obscene and brilliant restoration poet Rochester. 183 00:20:58,590 --> 00:21:02,580 Like most plays, this does not have an overarching narrator. 184 00:21:02,580 --> 00:21:11,250 But the central character opens and concludes the play with a direct address to the audience and addresses the audience several times in between, 185 00:21:11,250 --> 00:21:17,940 he starts quotation three. Allow me to be frank, at the commencement. 186 00:21:17,940 --> 00:21:24,830 You will not like me. The gentleman will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. 187 00:21:24,830 --> 00:21:30,260 You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on, 188 00:21:30,260 --> 00:21:39,020 he goes on to inform the female members of the audience that he is up for it all the time and then he addresses the gentleman. 189 00:21:39,020 --> 00:21:43,340 Don't worry, I'm up for that, too. And he concludes, I am John. 190 00:21:43,340 --> 00:21:48,620 Well, not second Earl of Rochester and I do not expect you to like me. 191 00:21:48,620 --> 00:21:55,520 Well, after various social and sexual misdeeds whilst he's dying of syphilis, he concludes the play well. 192 00:21:55,520 --> 00:21:58,030 Do you like me now? 193 00:21:58,030 --> 00:22:07,570 The answer is that we've been entertained by him, the greatest wit in England's restoration court as animated by gifted 20th century playwrights. 194 00:22:07,570 --> 00:22:16,390 Yes, actually, to some extent we probably do. Neither he nor his fellow hooligan, Alex, his fellow rebel Caulfield, 195 00:22:16,390 --> 00:22:26,320 or his fellow sex obsessed intellectual highway are unreliable in the same sense or to the same degree that my kangal beers. 196 00:22:26,320 --> 00:22:31,930 Nor, on the other hand, is likeability necessarily correlated to reliability. 197 00:22:31,930 --> 00:22:37,750 The connexion of goodness to idiocy is apparent, as you may know in the word silly, 198 00:22:37,750 --> 00:22:48,400 which derives from the German Salish or Holy from de la Soul via good to naive to trivial and foolish. 199 00:22:48,400 --> 00:22:54,730 The narrator of Dickens is The Pickwick Papers stops short of foolishness, as does Petric himself. 200 00:22:54,730 --> 00:23:02,440 But they are limited in their understanding and boundless in their trust in a way which is both precisely measured against the world, 201 00:23:02,440 --> 00:23:07,330 which the former's narration implies and which colours that world. 202 00:23:07,330 --> 00:23:12,400 The supposed editor of The Pickwick Papers opens the first ray of light, 203 00:23:12,400 --> 00:23:18,910 which illuminates the gloom and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history 204 00:23:18,910 --> 00:23:23,290 of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved is derived from the perusal, 205 00:23:23,290 --> 00:23:30,190 which the narrator editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, his readers. 206 00:23:30,190 --> 00:23:36,070 If their taste for humour takes a certain bent cannot but take some pleasure from such an account. 207 00:23:36,070 --> 00:23:47,620 And the flesh and blood author Dickens is not so cruel as to shock such readers by presenting a tragic world through such a mode of narration. 208 00:23:47,620 --> 00:23:52,300 Rather, the novel resembles a painting in the naive style, 209 00:23:52,300 --> 00:24:02,400 knowingly naive and benevolent in content, a garden scene, a street scene, not a massacre or a war. 210 00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:04,170 One could, of course, imagine the reverse, 211 00:24:04,170 --> 00:24:15,510 a mild liberal narrator of a fascist novel whose perspective was increasingly shown by the implied author to be dangerously naive. 212 00:24:15,510 --> 00:24:20,070 But although this might be successful at preaching to the converted anti Nazi, 213 00:24:20,070 --> 00:24:30,270 it runs the danger of making the narrator's unreliability less obvious than is Abdnor ability if it were directed as propaganda to a wider audience. 214 00:24:30,270 --> 00:24:36,570 Perhaps an analogous risk is run by EVELYNN War in Brideshead Revisited. 215 00:24:36,570 --> 00:24:41,250 This Second World War novel is narrated by a temperamentally moderate, 216 00:24:41,250 --> 00:24:47,040 rational atheist Englishman who becomes fascinated by and involved with an eccentric, 217 00:24:47,040 --> 00:24:53,190 temperamental, aristocratic Catholic family whilst he's an undergraduate at Oxford, not studying English. 218 00:24:53,190 --> 00:24:58,110 This time, his narration introduces the reader to that family's world. 219 00:24:58,110 --> 00:25:07,830 Now he, the narrator, like perhaps a statistical majority of the novels anticipated and actual readers, isn't Catholic. 220 00:25:07,830 --> 00:25:16,020 Nor does he admire or share any of the variously lapsed, hypocritical, naive, self tormenting, 221 00:25:16,020 --> 00:25:24,570 self-contradictory or mindlessly conventional forms of Catholicism, which the family's members variously embody. 222 00:25:24,570 --> 00:25:25,110 Finally, 223 00:25:25,110 --> 00:25:34,190 a happy and passionate affair between him and the daughter of the house is brought to an end when she is brought to a sense of guilt at living in sin. 224 00:25:34,190 --> 00:25:45,410 And yet, by the end of the novel, a hole has been knocked in his atheism and then one understands that the novel's implied author is a Catholic 225 00:25:45,410 --> 00:25:54,590 apologist who just happens to have made the circumstances of his apology as challenging for himself as possible. 226 00:25:54,590 --> 00:26:02,570 He is to hear let him hear a resolutely atheist or anti Catholic reader will reach the end of the novel 227 00:26:02,570 --> 00:26:09,620 unchanged and possibly without any sense that their narrator was unreliable except in his wavering. 228 00:26:09,620 --> 00:26:17,600 At the end, the implied author permits such a reading, and as such, the novel is unusual. 229 00:26:17,600 --> 00:26:27,210 Decent narrators such as that of the of the Pickwick Papers are rarely distant from the novels implied values. 230 00:26:27,210 --> 00:26:34,560 It's perhaps significant that Pickwick is Dickens's first major work in his conceit of making his 231 00:26:34,560 --> 00:26:40,950 narrator an editor and the comic distancia interposes between the implied author and the narrator, 232 00:26:40,950 --> 00:26:45,870 he shows a beginner's self-consciousness with the novel form. 233 00:26:45,870 --> 00:26:51,480 In fact, the English novel itself often showed such self-consciousness, 234 00:26:51,480 --> 00:26:57,810 playfulness and facetiousness in its early days until it had acquired the self-conscious 235 00:26:57,810 --> 00:27:03,750 confidence to be relatively transparent in technique and serious in mode. 236 00:27:03,750 --> 00:27:07,890 In the 18th century, the memoirs of the picaresque, self-justifying, 237 00:27:07,890 --> 00:27:16,020 polyamorous and incestuous Moll Flanders leaps to mind and the excruciatingly pedantic Tristram Shandy. 238 00:27:16,020 --> 00:27:25,980 Now, the latter is not factually unreliable, but the implied author is amused at his mode of reliability and the flesh and blood author 239 00:27:25,980 --> 00:27:33,390 sees fit to inflict this amusement on the flesh and blood reader at very considerable length. 240 00:27:33,390 --> 00:27:44,340 Nor are these early narrators always protagonists. Henry Fielding's narrators are typically out of his stories, but deliberately facetious. 241 00:27:44,340 --> 00:27:49,830 The opening book of Tom Jones is entitled Containing as much of the Birth of the Foundling 242 00:27:49,830 --> 00:27:54,960 as is necessary or proper to acquaint the reader with in the beginning of this history. 243 00:27:54,960 --> 00:28:02,970 This is a form of unreliability in the same way that a straight faced comic telling a joke is unreliable. 244 00:28:02,970 --> 00:28:08,340 In this sense, many comic novels have tonally unreliable narrators. 245 00:28:08,340 --> 00:28:15,120 Pride and Prejudice opens. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of fortune must be in want of a wife. 246 00:28:15,120 --> 00:28:19,380 The implied author tells us this is far from being a truth. 247 00:28:19,380 --> 00:28:27,620 Let's see how funny are those who frequently, for selfish reasons, tell themselves and each other that this is so. 248 00:28:27,620 --> 00:28:32,720 This, of course, is irony, other facetious narrators, however, 249 00:28:32,720 --> 00:28:41,990 represent the views of the implied author in a manner which makes them appear ridiculous without losing their satiric force. 250 00:28:41,990 --> 00:28:54,140 That's how clowns and the Elizabethan sense operate. My favourite example of this is Mr. Noone, an unfinished novel written by Lawrence in 1921. 251 00:28:54,140 --> 00:29:03,170 The third person narrator acts for the implied author like a petulant, energetic but ultimately benevolent schoolmaster, 252 00:29:03,170 --> 00:29:10,580 grabbing the back of the reader's in one hand and the back of his shorts in the other and frogmarched him up and down the page. 253 00:29:10,580 --> 00:29:17,240 When he addresses us as gentle reader as he frequently does, he is knowingly being sarcastic. 254 00:29:17,240 --> 00:29:23,420 He spends over one hundred pages telling us about Mr. Noon's pursuit of a local Nottinghamshire girl 255 00:29:23,420 --> 00:29:30,680 called Emy describes how noone is caught in flagrante with her by Emmies father in their greenhouse. 256 00:29:30,680 --> 00:29:41,570 And then suddenly the section ends. Part two of the novel is entitled Hai Germany, and the narrator makes this much immediately clear. 257 00:29:41,570 --> 00:29:46,850 No, I'm not going to tell you how Mr. Noone got out of that greenhouse. 258 00:29:46,850 --> 00:29:52,220 I am not eat the slop I've given for you given you and don't ask for more till I've got up 259 00:29:52,220 --> 00:29:56,770 the steep incline of the next page of declines like a diminished travilla over the brow. 260 00:29:56,770 --> 00:30:01,340 Third, you'll not hear another word about me. 261 00:30:01,340 --> 00:30:08,360 He then begins to reorientate us. It appears that for some reason Mr. Noone is now in Munich. 262 00:30:08,360 --> 00:30:12,200 Quotation for I expect you are waiting for me to continue that. 263 00:30:12,200 --> 00:30:18,320 The bedroom was a room in a brothel or in a third rate and shady hotel or in a garret or in a messy, 264 00:30:18,320 --> 00:30:23,240 artistic, bohemian house where a lot of lousy painters and students worked their abominations. 265 00:30:23,240 --> 00:30:26,810 Oh, I know you gentle reader, in your silent way. 266 00:30:26,810 --> 00:30:28,730 You would like to browbeat me into it, 267 00:30:28,730 --> 00:30:36,830 but I've kicked over the traces at last and I shall kick out the splash bored of this applecart if I have any more expectations to put up with. 268 00:30:36,830 --> 00:30:45,800 He then describes a very fine room, tells the reader to go in and change into something which matches the finery of Noon's new lodgings. 269 00:30:45,800 --> 00:30:51,410 And then, says Baule, gentle reader, bow across space to Munich, 270 00:30:51,410 --> 00:30:57,830 ancient capital of ancient kings known to the British on the beautiful postage stamps. 271 00:30:57,830 --> 00:31:10,610 What neither the narrator nor the implied author will tolerate is English provincialism, nationalism, or three years after the war, anti German ism. 272 00:31:10,610 --> 00:31:22,520 They castigate sentimentalism, prudery, squeamishness and cowardice, just as do Lawrences other works, but never in so exuberantly bullying a mode. 273 00:31:22,520 --> 00:31:27,560 Given that the novel was left unfinished and only published in nineteen eighty four, 274 00:31:27,560 --> 00:31:34,590 the freedom with which he browbeats his readers is probably affected by his sense that they he knew they didn't exist. 275 00:31:34,590 --> 00:31:39,390 And it's a shame that this of all his novels is the one most restricted to 276 00:31:39,390 --> 00:31:44,700 Lawrence specialists since Lawrence in a multicoloured suit and Jester's hat, 277 00:31:44,700 --> 00:31:53,850 may appeal more to precisely such people as Dislike Lawrence than his other subtler and more serious narrators. 278 00:31:53,850 --> 00:31:55,170 Even this narrator, though, 279 00:31:55,170 --> 00:32:03,240 varies his tone when he is most occupied with the developing relationship of noon and the married German woman with whom he has elapsed. 280 00:32:03,240 --> 00:32:09,090 And yes, this is an autobiographical novel. His tone is intensely serious. 281 00:32:09,090 --> 00:32:14,520 In high Germany, he only whips out his mock truncheon on a few occasions when it occurs to him to 282 00:32:14,520 --> 00:32:18,840 see if the hellcat of a reader that's another thing we get called is still there, 283 00:32:18,840 --> 00:32:28,700 paying attention and getting the point. But variations in tone and mode of narration are, of course, common to many texts, 284 00:32:28,700 --> 00:32:37,340 free and direct speech is only recognisable as such if the perspective or style of the narrator and vocalising character differ. 285 00:32:37,340 --> 00:32:44,900 And since the narrator necessarily has a broader perspective than the character by which they're temporally inflected, 286 00:32:44,900 --> 00:32:54,410 this constitutes temporary, unreliable narration in works with multiple narrators or multiple vocalising consciousnesses. 287 00:32:54,410 --> 00:33:02,630 It's likely that each one of them will be qualified by the presence of the others and unreliable insofar as their understanding 288 00:33:02,630 --> 00:33:11,600 and knowledge of the world is shown to be partial in the ontological and ethical senses of the word partial in Ulysses. 289 00:33:11,600 --> 00:33:22,370 Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom's consciousnesses are more reflected than are those of any other characters, but their presences qualify each other. 290 00:33:22,370 --> 00:33:27,290 Not only that, but the novel's techniques, which are not tied to consciousness, 291 00:33:27,290 --> 00:33:34,040 advertising style, play, script, catechism all demonstrate each other's limitations. 292 00:33:34,040 --> 00:33:43,850 One might consider one style or consciousness to be more perspicacious, capacious or mature than another in relation to that of the implied author. 293 00:33:43,850 --> 00:33:48,730 But such a hierarchy is not strongly urged on the reader. 294 00:33:48,730 --> 00:33:52,690 In other works of multiple narrators, on the other hand, 295 00:33:52,690 --> 00:34:03,400 the unreliability of some is stressed and measured against the relatively relative reliability of the most likeable or most mature. 296 00:34:03,400 --> 00:34:12,730 For example, in Julian Barnes is a history of the world. In 10 and a half chapters, Chapter eight Upstream opens with Darling. 297 00:34:12,730 --> 00:34:18,130 Just time for a card. We leave in half an hour. Had our last night on the Johnnie Walker. 298 00:34:18,130 --> 00:34:24,400 Now it's local firewater or nothing. Remember what I said and don't have it cut to short. 299 00:34:24,400 --> 00:34:32,530 Love you, your circus strong man. What follows are a sequence of postcards from an actor to his girlfriend in England. 300 00:34:32,530 --> 00:34:35,500 He's filming in a South American jungle. 301 00:34:35,500 --> 00:34:44,380 He realises to be fair on him as quickly as the reader does, that his girlfriend, who doesn't respond to anything he writes, is being unfaithful. 302 00:34:44,380 --> 00:34:49,150 What makes him unreliable is the fact that the implied author, 303 00:34:49,150 --> 00:34:55,270 who has also created far more sophisticated narrators within the same volume history 304 00:34:55,270 --> 00:35:00,370 of the world in terms of chapters finds him unwise and intellectually limited. 305 00:35:00,370 --> 00:35:09,330 But that's a judgement that's made through comparison. Sometimes the unreliability of a narrator is itself unreliable. 306 00:35:09,330 --> 00:35:15,330 Such cases require very careful reading James Joyce's Dubliners, 307 00:35:15,330 --> 00:35:21,480 which in any case requires very careful reading, you may remember an encounter, one of the short stories. 308 00:35:21,480 --> 00:35:26,580 The narrator is one of two boys who spends a day bunking off school. 309 00:35:26,580 --> 00:35:30,990 Initially, the perspective of the narrator seems to be that of a boy. 310 00:35:30,990 --> 00:35:35,580 The story opens. It was Joe Dylan who introduced the Wild West to us. 311 00:35:35,580 --> 00:35:42,870 He looked like some kind of an Indian. When you keep it around the garden, an old tea cosy on his head, beating time with his fist. 312 00:35:42,870 --> 00:35:51,180 Not to us. He looked like some kind of an Indian, or he looked, as we then imagined an Indian to look. 313 00:35:51,180 --> 00:35:57,870 The narrator also notes Mahoney used slang freely and spoke of Father Butler as Bunsen burner. 314 00:35:57,870 --> 00:36:04,380 This description has some of the awe of a schoolboy who does not or not yet use slang. 315 00:36:04,380 --> 00:36:07,530 When we came to the smoothing iron, we arranged to see it. 316 00:36:07,530 --> 00:36:10,440 But it was a failure because you must have at least three here. 317 00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:18,240 He's patiently explaining his children sometimes well to other adults how to play a game on the assumption that we don't know how it works. 318 00:36:18,240 --> 00:36:23,910 And yet, at other times, the narrative seems far distant from childhood. 319 00:36:23,910 --> 00:36:32,520 A spirit of unruliness defused itself amongst us and under its influences, difference of culture and constitution were waved. 320 00:36:32,520 --> 00:36:36,120 We banded ourselves together. 321 00:36:36,120 --> 00:36:43,710 The protagonist then handles an incident in which an elderly man starts talking to him and then disappears to masturbate very well. 322 00:36:43,710 --> 00:36:54,750 It turns out that such wisdom as is present in the text does not just belong to the intermittent intermittently present narrating adult, 323 00:36:54,750 --> 00:37:03,760 but actually to the young boy himself. Then we have the cases over which there are arguments, 324 00:37:03,760 --> 00:37:13,560 a classic example of this is Tolstoy's eighteen eighties novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, as you read this. 325 00:37:13,560 --> 00:37:22,170 OK, in which the central character pulls Neshev tells his life story to the narrator who finds himself sitting in a train carriage with him. 326 00:37:22,170 --> 00:37:26,700 The latest trains in Russia, by the way, are open plan. This kind of life is disappearing now, 327 00:37:26,700 --> 00:37:32,070 but the point is one has very long conversations when one's in these compartments and the 328 00:37:32,070 --> 00:37:37,770 whole novella is told by the man he's giving his life story to his travelling companion. 329 00:37:37,770 --> 00:37:43,410 What happened in his life was that he killed his wife because he suspected her of having an affair with a musician. 330 00:37:43,410 --> 00:37:51,720 Now he's opposed to sex altogether because he considers it to be corruptive of both men and women. 331 00:37:51,720 --> 00:37:57,330 Now, Paul's Neshev certainly resembles an unreliable narrator. 332 00:37:57,330 --> 00:38:04,860 He is repellent, quote, Every now and again he uttered strange sounds as if he was clearing his throat or beginning to laugh, 333 00:38:04,860 --> 00:38:14,050 but breaking off in silence. He is a murderer, of course, and also his proposals for social reform would actually render humanity extinct. 334 00:38:14,050 --> 00:38:20,740 But the liberated lady and the conservative gentleman who were initially also in the same compartment and with 335 00:38:20,740 --> 00:38:28,660 whom he argues in the devil opening pages are both made to look unsatisfactory when they argue with him. 336 00:38:28,660 --> 00:38:38,530 He also has the quality of knowing his limitations. He has the last word, and the novella has to epigraphs both from the gospel of Matthew, 337 00:38:38,530 --> 00:38:44,680 which have obviously not been selected by him, but by the narrator who has chosen to reproduce his narrative. 338 00:38:44,680 --> 00:38:51,730 Both of these quotations from Matthew indorse personally shivs views on celibacy. 339 00:38:51,730 --> 00:38:55,310 Whether or not we read Neshev as reliable, however, 340 00:38:55,310 --> 00:39:04,420 it really depends on whether we find it credible that a flesh and blood person would create an implied author who shares partnership. 341 00:39:04,420 --> 00:39:14,440 Disney shares views, and we know from Tolstoy's extra literary post face to the novella that he did. 342 00:39:14,440 --> 00:39:17,830 It is clear that such persons as the writers of these not notes, 343 00:39:17,830 --> 00:39:26,730 not only May but positively must exist in our society when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. 344 00:39:26,730 --> 00:39:37,360 Actually, that isn't Tolstoy. It's Dostoyevsky, his contemporary on the underground man who is an opposite case of a narrator asserted 345 00:39:37,360 --> 00:39:44,230 by the author to be unreliable but with a greater popular following than positive. 346 00:39:44,230 --> 00:39:50,050 Quotation five. I'm a sick man. I am a spiteful man. 347 00:39:50,050 --> 00:39:55,120 I'm an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. 348 00:39:55,120 --> 00:40:00,550 However, I know nothing at all about my disease. I am well educated not. 349 00:40:00,550 --> 00:40:07,210 I'm well educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious. 350 00:40:07,210 --> 00:40:14,500 He has flashes of self-knowledge. His self-consciousness is self validating and he can amuse you. 351 00:40:14,500 --> 00:40:20,410 Imagine, no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that too. 352 00:40:20,410 --> 00:40:24,790 However, irritated by all this babble. And I feel that you are irritated. 353 00:40:24,790 --> 00:40:31,030 You think fit to ask me who I am, then my answer is I am a collegiate assessor. 354 00:40:31,030 --> 00:40:38,410 One almost expects to hear I am John Wilmont, second Earl of Rochester, his poetic predecessor. 355 00:40:38,410 --> 00:40:45,370 That is in his opening words. He both is and is not unreliable, a rhetorical equivalent of the logical paradox. 356 00:40:45,370 --> 00:40:50,380 I am lying. Yet by the end, 357 00:40:50,380 --> 00:40:55,870 when he justifies his ill treatment of a kind prostitute and claims that we all 358 00:40:55,870 --> 00:40:59,980 have a kind of loathing for real life and so can't bear to be reminded of it, 359 00:40:59,980 --> 00:41:04,620 then for some readers at least, he has overstepped the mark. 360 00:41:04,620 --> 00:41:11,790 Nabokov's to return to him, Lolita has generated a different kind of critical controversy. 361 00:41:11,790 --> 00:41:18,220 It is a brilliant novel. The implied author gives us laughs at almost every line. 362 00:41:18,220 --> 00:41:24,940 But he also gives us hundreds of pages of the narrative perspective of a paedophile for who for the first half of the novel at least, 363 00:41:24,940 --> 00:41:34,850 is in a constantly prime state of lust. Moreover, the humour is that of the implied author, not Humbert himself. 364 00:41:34,850 --> 00:41:42,530 Readers reactions to the novel vary, but some are queasy in the presence of a certain kind of subject matter, 365 00:41:42,530 --> 00:41:45,440 like greatest analysis novel American Psycho, 366 00:41:45,440 --> 00:41:54,680 the same might apply the supposed editor editing the prison papers of Humbert Humbert writes in his introduction Quotations six. 367 00:41:54,680 --> 00:41:59,690 I have no intention to glorify H.H. No doubt he's horrible. 368 00:41:59,690 --> 00:42:06,500 He is abject. He is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of etc., etc. 369 00:42:06,500 --> 00:42:13,700 A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him of sins of diabolical cunning, 370 00:42:13,700 --> 00:42:17,870 but how magically his singing violin can conjure up a torn dress. 371 00:42:17,870 --> 00:42:24,350 A compassion for Lalita that makes us entranced with the book while still pouring its author. 372 00:42:24,350 --> 00:42:28,640 That is supposedly by John Ray Junior, Ph.D. 373 00:42:28,640 --> 00:42:39,650 The implied author, in fact, asks for this attitude even while here parodying this local unreliable narrator. 374 00:42:39,650 --> 00:42:47,930 Nabokov himself is more direct in his nonfictional separate work on a book entitled Lolita, 375 00:42:47,930 --> 00:42:56,690 Nabokov claims that people felt let down by the expectation that this would be pornography when they found literature instead. 376 00:42:56,690 --> 00:43:03,440 He then goes on that my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. 377 00:43:03,440 --> 00:43:08,600 But after all, we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English. 378 00:43:08,600 --> 00:43:16,220 Public school boys who, after a night of homosexual romps, have to endure the paradox of reading the ancients and expurgated versions. 379 00:43:16,220 --> 00:43:23,600 This really doesn't address the point that the stablest readers with the rich sense of humour may find Humboldt's prolonged company, 380 00:43:23,600 --> 00:43:26,660 particularly in the first half of the novel distasteful. 381 00:43:26,660 --> 00:43:32,840 Nor really does Alfred Apple Junior, who, believe it or not, is a real person writing in 1970, 382 00:43:32,840 --> 00:43:42,440 who says the problem of its alleged pornography indeed seems remote today, which I think tells us a lot about nineteen seventy. 383 00:43:42,440 --> 00:43:47,570 Nabokov is also responsible for the most spectacular case of unreliable narration. 384 00:43:47,570 --> 00:43:51,980 I know Pale Fire, the one I like my copy of. 385 00:43:51,980 --> 00:43:58,760 This is a nine hundred and ninety nine line poem, supposedly, supposedly by an American poet called John Shade, 386 00:43:58,760 --> 00:44:04,130 copiously annotated by his sometime neighbour and colleague Charles Kein boat captain. 387 00:44:04,130 --> 00:44:09,050 Boat reads the poem largely in relation to the history of the deposition of a King Charles, the second, 388 00:44:09,050 --> 00:44:17,330 the beloved of Sembler, his escape from Sembler and a man named Greatest Failure to assassinate him. 389 00:44:17,330 --> 00:44:25,970 A reading of Shade's eccentric but otherwise undistinguished poem gives one very little basis for that reading. 390 00:44:25,970 --> 00:44:34,580 Moreover, it can boast notes of self serving. It's clear that his claims of friendship with the poet are grossly self delusional. 391 00:44:34,580 --> 00:44:38,120 In his introduction, Convoke describes the conditions of his writing, 392 00:44:38,120 --> 00:44:42,590 the shaky little affair on which my typewriter is precariously enthroned now in this 393 00:44:42,590 --> 00:44:48,590 wretched motor lodge with that carousel outside and outside my head miles away from you. 394 00:44:48,590 --> 00:44:56,450 Why? All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens in Emblem. 395 00:44:56,450 --> 00:45:06,350 It is. It is an archetypal, unreliable narrator, but the implied author doesn't allow us to rest in any stable sense of his unreliability. 396 00:45:06,350 --> 00:45:13,910 Over the course of reading the commentary, which is much longer than the poem, one begins to suspect that can vote is the deposed King Charles. 397 00:45:13,910 --> 00:45:21,800 And by the end of the book that reading itself is unlikely. There is vigorous, critical debate as to the ontology of this. 398 00:45:21,800 --> 00:45:31,880 NARRATOR Some argue that Ken Vote is in fact a minor character in the text named Botkin who who is created can vote as an alter ego. 399 00:45:31,880 --> 00:45:36,200 Some argue that can boat created the poet Shade and the poem, 400 00:45:36,200 --> 00:45:44,090 and some argue that Shade created can boat as his own fictional commentator, Nabokov himself favoured the Botkin reading. 401 00:45:44,090 --> 00:45:52,340 But we don't have to be swayed by that. The point is that Nabokov created an ontological and interpretive conundrum. 402 00:45:52,340 --> 00:45:59,570 It's a work which makes you reflect on literary criticism, inevitably with self-consciousness, 403 00:45:59,570 --> 00:46:06,300 also on the nature of fiction itself and the rules which determine reality within it. 404 00:46:06,300 --> 00:46:11,750 And if we're thinking in those times, unreliability can be pretty broadly defined. 405 00:46:11,750 --> 00:46:21,800 Any narrator who doesn't tell the reader the whole plot instantly without withholding information is perhaps in that sense unreliable, 406 00:46:21,800 --> 00:46:29,990 whereas narrative is defined as the deviation from the shortest path between the beginning and the end. 407 00:46:29,990 --> 00:46:36,890 And there is, of course, an overarching unreliability in all fiction which presents itself as such. 408 00:46:36,890 --> 00:46:46,370 Briony Tallis asks, How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? 409 00:46:46,370 --> 00:46:53,090 Likewise, how can a reader determine what is unreliable by playing God? 410 00:46:53,090 --> 00:47:00,853 Thank you.