OK, great.
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,
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.
I never get hay fever and streaming. I made it actually quite hard to read the texts that I wanted to write about.
Then, of course, I wanted to write about in a Book of Pale Fire, and I discovered that my heavily annotated edition,
annotated by myself in pencil in the margins I had lent to a student.
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.
And I thought this was a worthy project, so I gladly lent the copy.
But I think three years is quite a long line, and my suspicion is that that student has now gone to another university,
has started writing that Ph.D. is possibly using my pencil annotations without attribution.
So I made a note to myself to actually look at dissertation abstracts UK to see whether that's taken place.
And instead I went to the English Faculty Library to borrow their copy.
Now their copy impressively is signed both by Nabokov, his wife Vera and their son Dmitri,
which is highly unusual because Dmitri famously disapproved of his father's works.
And then what did I find?
That the English faculty library, which I had not previously been aware, is run by crypto communists, the staff who were on strike.
So I can borrow that copy either. And in any case, my headache was getting worse.
So I thought that I would give up on this project and go home and work from there.
I had other books that I could refer to, of course, and then a few other things happened.
I live on the street a little bit. Down the way is a joke shop and this joke shop got broken into.
The burglar alarm was set off. It went on and on and on.
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.
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.
Remedy on this note, sorry, on this break was attached a note and it was one word concentrate.
And so I did. How do we know that narrative is unreliable?
It arises from the impression that we are not the reader desired by the narrator.
The desired reader is not only competent to understand it through, for example,
understanding the language in which it's written and knowing enough about the subjects concerned,
but is also sympathetic to its perspectives and trusting in its facts.
A feeling of discomfort arises when there is a distance between the actual and the implied.
Reader is large, and especially when you are aware that the implied reader is not one that you want any more closely to resemble.
So, for example, reading the sections of Mein Kampf which concern Jews,
I can see the logical contradictions and sinister implications which the implied reader would not and which I do not wish
to lose sight of except in order to perform the thought experiment of understanding those who are influenced by it.
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.
Wholly convinced, a reader's sense of distance from the implied reader is always more uncomfortable in
cases where the presence from beginning to end of the implied reader is actually assumed.
No attempt is made to persuade of the author's perspective because no one is thought necessary.
One could take the example of the transcript of a 17th century witch trial,
which assumes Alyx readers a belief in the existence of which is the necessity for their
punishment and the justice of the trial through which they are put from such a text.
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.
But Mein Kampf and the transcript of the witch trial are not what is commonly meant
by unreliable narration because a further element is necessary to that concept.
That is, that certain elements in the text strongly suggest that certain other elements in the text are to be distrusted.
Specifically, the narrative voice is undermined by features of the text, which that narrative voice produces factually, ethically or both.
A narrator suggested to be contemptible. Lt might tell one the truth like John Self in Martin Amis novel Money,
one suggested to be good might understand less than the reader about what is occurring, like Olive Goldsmith's vicar of Wakefield.
But it is not repeat to repeat enough that a critique can be made of the assumptions of the narrator.
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,
came into the room and walked with quick, short steps over to the desk.
And we to. Feel free to interrupt. General Gee looked up and waved to the nearest chair at the conference table.
Good evening, comrade. The squat face split into a sugary smile.
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.
This is orchestrated for maximum effect,
the effect relies on the assumptions that neither heads of intelligence organisations nor people with total figures and squat faces are women.
The overturning of these expectations aims at generating surprise combined with amusement and intensified disgust at the squat figure,
which is the more repellent by virtue of belonging to female.
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.
No. Thank you. Which is therefore not unreliably, narrated in the conventional sense of that term,
the American critic Wayne S. Booth gave the following half a definition,
which is a quotation one for those of you who have got handouts, they will be on Leblon.
I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work,
which is to say, the implied author's norms, unreliable when he does not.
The implied author is another is another concept which bears Booth's stamp, he makes what I find a helpful distinction between the SBP,
the flesh and blood person, on the one hand, the implied author on another I shouldn't have brought.
Hanson is three and the narrator. For example, Atonement by Ian McEwan is written by the male FPP Ian McEwan,
born in Hampshire in nineteen forty eight, he is like every one of us, infinitely complex.
But we can infer certain things about him from his authorship of this historical Second World War novel.
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
literature was being read in Cambridge by undergraduates in the nineteen thirties.
He or she is prepared to spend several hundred pages dwelling on a woman tormented by guilt for a childhood crime and
is prepared to spring a major narrative twist on the reader and has considerable skill with the English language.
All of these things have to be true of the FPP and also of the implied author.
But in addition, the implied author has certain opinions.
He considers that the British retreat from Dunkirk was a shambles, as it is represented by the novel things,
that it is wrong to maliciously accuse someone of rape and considers it appropriate that
someone who has done this should spend the rest of their lives tormented by guilt.
In other words, McEwan has to know and do the things we find in the novel in order to have written it.
But he doesn't have to share the implied author's values, maybe privately.
Ian McEwan considers that the retreat from Dunkirk was in fact a rather glorious moment for the British with their with their little boats.
But he thought perhaps that this novel would find greater favour amongst his readership if it embraced revisionism.
We can't know for sure. And finally, we have his narrator who we discover in the final section is Briony Tallis,
who up to this point has been one of the characters in the novel being narrated in the third person.
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,
testimony from which another implied author, Brian italicise implied author, can be extrapolated.
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.
Admittedly, a famous critic thought to be so, Colonie occasionally criticises the style of Telesis opening section as pretentious.
This opens up a slight difference between Briony DBP and the implied author of that section of the novel.
Also, Bryony's novel, her testament dates at the end from fact as she herself confesses.
But she justifies this as a kindness to her lovers and the reader to let them survive and love the actual FPP.
McEwan presumably justifies this and the subsequent revelation of the narrator's unreliability as part of a moving examination of guilt and grief.
That's the biggest difference between them, and it's not that great.
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.
You may not like her. You may not agree with her perspective on guilt, but the novel doesn't dislike her.
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.
All you know is that the implied critique being constructed by the FBB that is me thinks that.
And perhaps you've already had reason to distrust that. There were many cases which are clearer than atonement.
A fairly good recent example is Sebastian Faulks novel Ingleby published in 2007.
Anybody read this? OK, very few.
All right, and you'll be structured as the diary of a young man through his time studying English at Cambridge University.
If you want a bit of self reflexive fiction, a bit of a historical kind. Go ahead.
So although I am about to give away the plot, I'm afraid he's studying English at Cambridge University.
And and then we go on with his diary to him working as a journalist in London after he's graduated.
He's well read and he's very clever.
He's also contemptuous of most things, most people, his university, his course, the study of English literature and so on.
He's strongly attracted to a fellow student called Jennifer. He spends a lot of his time on his own driving to rural pubs.
I know them around Cambridge, engaging in shoplifting and taking nameless drugs.
Here's an example of his style quotation to describing the road system around Basingstoke.
The town seethed like lockdown within its concentric ring roads.
I followed the signs for the centre, but after I'd spent 15 minutes obediently going where the signs told me,
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,
I didn't know that T.S. Eliot had been on the Basingstoke Urban District Council.
Highways ring roads and Street Furniture Committee Micas satirical.
He knows as T.S. Eliot, some readers will find this somewhat juvenile and pretentious.
I say some flesh and blood readers are various English readers belonging to a relatively anti intellectual country
are likely to have a lower pretentious pretentiousness threshold than the readers of some other countries.
Also, some behave in ways that others would describe as juvenile and pretentious,
and perhaps some of those would find my exploration purely witty and erudite.
But the number of flesh and blood readers who,
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.
However, there's also the question of trust. Certain details of Mike's narration contradict his analysis of them.
He claims to have many friends, for example, but as I say, he spends most of his time on his own.
It's clear that his fellow students keep an arm's length from him and they the
other students don't emerge as people wholly without judgement of character.
Minor provocation sent into his blue pills and inaccurate comments about a music band throws them into such a fury that he wakes up,
as he tells us, in the psychiatric ward. On one occasion, my own diagnosis of the problem is simple, he explains.
It's that I share 50 percent of my genome with a banana and ninety eight percent with a chimpanzee.
Bananas don't do psychological consistency and the tiny part of us that's different.
The special Homo sapiens bit is faulty. It doesn't work.
Sorry about that. Voiced by another narrator, this might be witty and wise and suggest a correspondingly witty and wise implied author,
but in the context of the rest of Mike's narration,
it acquires worryingly direct pertinently to Mike himself, suggesting his fault in us at least as much as it confirms his Homo sapiens.
One day, Jennifer aforementioned goes missing. The last time Mike saw her was the night before when he gave her a lift home.
He follows the colleges and the police's attempts to find her, and when this fails, the attempt to find her.
And when this failed attempt to find her assumed murderer, he graduates and becomes a journalist.
Finally, he himself becomes the object of a police investigation.
Years later, he is in the end arrested and delivered to a secure psychiatric ward and gives the account now,
which up to this point he suppressed of what occurred on the night in which he gave Jennifer a lift.
At some stage in this process, the reader understands that Mike killed her.
The location of this stage will vary greatly between different readers.
A reading involving early suspicion of Mike is perhaps not necessarily the best reading.
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.
Or it might stem from a particularly strong aversion to Mike's brand of intellectual snobbery.
To the extent of making a juvenile quota of Elliott obviously seem capable of murder more positively.
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.
Or she might have read his previous novel, Human Traces,
about the early development of psychiatry and be sensitised to signs of mental instability and forces writing.
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
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.
Mike Ingleby himself, who is actually not a bad literary critic, would be forced to read that novel in such a way,
even if he had more sympathy with the protagonist than did most readers or folks who,
in an interview after publication, described NLB as a [INAUDIBLE].
It is possible to construct films on a similar principle. The two thousand film Memento, which is based on a short story,
is partly told through the perspective of the protagonist who's trying to avenge
the murder of his wife but is suffering from a disease which affects his memory.
As the viewer is vulnerable to his perspective,
she sees the events as he does without the context necessary to interpret them until gradually a different picture emerges.
I think, Mike, NLB typifies one kind of unreliable narrator, a one class of unreliable narrator, which could be called the young male.
This kind of narrators use correlates to a relatively limited perspective, and this in combination with their maleness to a certain type of arrogance.
This can be found in works even by relatively young males.
The Rachel Papers was written by Martin Amis when he was twenty four and is narrated
by a man on the eve of his 20th birthday describing his life over the previous year.
Like Mike Ingleby, Charles Highway studies, English literature is bright, neurotic and despises most people.
The situations in which he involves himself often make him look ridiculous, and his descriptions of the world are often limited by his narcissism.
However, he is factually reliable and no murderer. His account of the woman he wants, with whom he eventually has sex demonstrates an overweight,
overweening male ego and wit from which the novel as a whole distances itself only to a very limited degree.
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,
is suspended between pity for the narrator dislike of the implied author who does not condemn
him more and transferred dislike of the flesh and blood author who created that implied author.
Something of the same is true of Jadi Sound as Holden Caulfield.
NARRATOR and protagonist of a Catcher in the Rye.
Now this protagonist lacks the intelligence of NLB or highway, but shares that neurotic contempt for most people and NLB solitariness and instability.
He's expelled from school for poor performance, runs away from his family as a clumsy encounter with a prostitute,
gets beaten up, nearly runs off with his sister and finally accepts that he's sick.
Like NLB, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. But unlike him, he has become a hero and icon for generations of teenagers.
They are not misreading the text. It is possible for a narrator to be very young, naive, self-destructive,
destructive and arrogant and for sympathy for him not to be prohibited by that text's rhetoric.
Perhaps the same is true of Alex ultraviolent teenage narrator Vancity Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.
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.
Finally, I would add to the protagonist of a play, Stephen Jeffries's The Libertine,
based on the life of the obscene and brilliant restoration poet Rochester.
Like most plays, this does not have an overarching narrator.
But the central character opens and concludes the play with a direct address to the audience and addresses the audience several times in between,
he starts quotation three. Allow me to be frank, at the commencement.
You will not like me. The gentleman will be envious and the ladies will be repelled.
You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on,
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.
Don't worry, I'm up for that, too. And he concludes, I am John.
Well, not second Earl of Rochester and I do not expect you to like me.
Well, after various social and sexual misdeeds whilst he's dying of syphilis, he concludes the play well.
Do you like me now?
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.
Yes, actually, to some extent we probably do. Neither he nor his fellow hooligan, Alex, his fellow rebel Caulfield,
or his fellow sex obsessed intellectual highway are unreliable in the same sense or to the same degree that my kangal beers.
Nor, on the other hand, is likeability necessarily correlated to reliability.
The connexion of goodness to idiocy is apparent, as you may know in the word silly,
which derives from the German Salish or Holy from de la Soul via good to naive to trivial and foolish.
The narrator of Dickens is The Pickwick Papers stops short of foolishness, as does Petric himself.
But they are limited in their understanding and boundless in their trust in a way which is both precisely measured against the world,
which the former's narration implies and which colours that world.
The supposed editor of The Pickwick Papers opens the first ray of light,
which illuminates the gloom and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history
of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved is derived from the perusal,
which the narrator editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, his readers.
If their taste for humour takes a certain bent cannot but take some pleasure from such an account.
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.
Rather, the novel resembles a painting in the naive style,
knowingly naive and benevolent in content, a garden scene, a street scene, not a massacre or a war.
One could, of course, imagine the reverse,
a mild liberal narrator of a fascist novel whose perspective was increasingly shown by the implied author to be dangerously naive.
But although this might be successful at preaching to the converted anti Nazi,
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.
Perhaps an analogous risk is run by EVELYNN War in Brideshead Revisited.
This Second World War novel is narrated by a temperamentally moderate,
rational atheist Englishman who becomes fascinated by and involved with an eccentric,
temperamental, aristocratic Catholic family whilst he's an undergraduate at Oxford, not studying English.
This time, his narration introduces the reader to that family's world.
Now he, the narrator, like perhaps a statistical majority of the novels anticipated and actual readers, isn't Catholic.
Nor does he admire or share any of the variously lapsed, hypocritical, naive, self tormenting,
self-contradictory or mindlessly conventional forms of Catholicism, which the family's members variously embody.
Finally,
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.
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
apologist who just happens to have made the circumstances of his apology as challenging for himself as possible.
He is to hear let him hear a resolutely atheist or anti Catholic reader will reach the end of the novel
unchanged and possibly without any sense that their narrator was unreliable except in his wavering.
At the end, the implied author permits such a reading, and as such, the novel is unusual.
Decent narrators such as that of the of the Pickwick Papers are rarely distant from the novels implied values.
It's perhaps significant that Pickwick is Dickens's first major work in his conceit of making his
narrator an editor and the comic distancia interposes between the implied author and the narrator,
he shows a beginner's self-consciousness with the novel form.
In fact, the English novel itself often showed such self-consciousness,
playfulness and facetiousness in its early days until it had acquired the self-conscious
confidence to be relatively transparent in technique and serious in mode.
In the 18th century, the memoirs of the picaresque, self-justifying,
polyamorous and incestuous Moll Flanders leaps to mind and the excruciatingly pedantic Tristram Shandy.
Now, the latter is not factually unreliable, but the implied author is amused at his mode of reliability and the flesh and blood author
sees fit to inflict this amusement on the flesh and blood reader at very considerable length.
Nor are these early narrators always protagonists. Henry Fielding's narrators are typically out of his stories, but deliberately facetious.
The opening book of Tom Jones is entitled Containing as much of the Birth of the Foundling
as is necessary or proper to acquaint the reader with in the beginning of this history.
This is a form of unreliability in the same way that a straight faced comic telling a joke is unreliable.
In this sense, many comic novels have tonally unreliable narrators.
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.
The implied author tells us this is far from being a truth.
Let's see how funny are those who frequently, for selfish reasons, tell themselves and each other that this is so.
This, of course, is irony, other facetious narrators, however,
represent the views of the implied author in a manner which makes them appear ridiculous without losing their satiric force.
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.
The third person narrator acts for the implied author like a petulant, energetic but ultimately benevolent schoolmaster,
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.
When he addresses us as gentle reader as he frequently does, he is knowingly being sarcastic.
He spends over one hundred pages telling us about Mr. Noon's pursuit of a local Nottinghamshire girl
called Emy describes how noone is caught in flagrante with her by Emmies father in their greenhouse.
And then suddenly the section ends. Part two of the novel is entitled Hai Germany, and the narrator makes this much immediately clear.
No, I'm not going to tell you how Mr. Noone got out of that greenhouse.
I am not eat the slop I've given for you given you and don't ask for more till I've got up
the steep incline of the next page of declines like a diminished travilla over the brow.
Third, you'll not hear another word about me.
He then begins to reorientate us. It appears that for some reason Mr. Noone is now in Munich.
Quotation for I expect you are waiting for me to continue that.
The bedroom was a room in a brothel or in a third rate and shady hotel or in a garret or in a messy,
artistic, bohemian house where a lot of lousy painters and students worked their abominations.
Oh, I know you gentle reader, in your silent way.
You would like to browbeat me into it,
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.
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.
And then, says Baule, gentle reader, bow across space to Munich,
ancient capital of ancient kings known to the British on the beautiful postage stamps.
What neither the narrator nor the implied author will tolerate is English provincialism, nationalism, or three years after the war, anti German ism.
They castigate sentimentalism, prudery, squeamishness and cowardice, just as do Lawrences other works, but never in so exuberantly bullying a mode.
Given that the novel was left unfinished and only published in nineteen eighty four,
the freedom with which he browbeats his readers is probably affected by his sense that they he knew they didn't exist.
And it's a shame that this of all his novels is the one most restricted to
Lawrence specialists since Lawrence in a multicoloured suit and Jester's hat,
may appeal more to precisely such people as Dislike Lawrence than his other subtler and more serious narrators.
Even this narrator, though,
varies his tone when he is most occupied with the developing relationship of noon and the married German woman with whom he has elapsed.
And yes, this is an autobiographical novel. His tone is intensely serious.
In high Germany, he only whips out his mock truncheon on a few occasions when it occurs to him to
see if the hellcat of a reader that's another thing we get called is still there,
paying attention and getting the point. But variations in tone and mode of narration are, of course, common to many texts,
free and direct speech is only recognisable as such if the perspective or style of the narrator and vocalising character differ.
And since the narrator necessarily has a broader perspective than the character by which they're temporally inflected,
this constitutes temporary, unreliable narration in works with multiple narrators or multiple vocalising consciousnesses.
It's likely that each one of them will be qualified by the presence of the others and unreliable insofar as their understanding
and knowledge of the world is shown to be partial in the ontological and ethical senses of the word partial in Ulysses.
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom's consciousnesses are more reflected than are those of any other characters, but their presences qualify each other.
Not only that, but the novel's techniques, which are not tied to consciousness,
advertising style, play, script, catechism all demonstrate each other's limitations.
One might consider one style or consciousness to be more perspicacious, capacious or mature than another in relation to that of the implied author.
But such a hierarchy is not strongly urged on the reader.
In other works of multiple narrators, on the other hand,
the unreliability of some is stressed and measured against the relatively relative reliability of the most likeable or most mature.
For example, in Julian Barnes is a history of the world. In 10 and a half chapters, Chapter eight Upstream opens with Darling.
Just time for a card. We leave in half an hour. Had our last night on the Johnnie Walker.
Now it's local firewater or nothing. Remember what I said and don't have it cut to short.
Love you, your circus strong man. What follows are a sequence of postcards from an actor to his girlfriend in England.
He's filming in a South American jungle.
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.
What makes him unreliable is the fact that the implied author,
who has also created far more sophisticated narrators within the same volume history
of the world in terms of chapters finds him unwise and intellectually limited.
But that's a judgement that's made through comparison. Sometimes the unreliability of a narrator is itself unreliable.
Such cases require very careful reading James Joyce's Dubliners,
which in any case requires very careful reading, you may remember an encounter, one of the short stories.
The narrator is one of two boys who spends a day bunking off school.
Initially, the perspective of the narrator seems to be that of a boy.
The story opens. It was Joe Dylan who introduced the Wild West to us.
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.
Not to us. He looked like some kind of an Indian, or he looked, as we then imagined an Indian to look.
The narrator also notes Mahoney used slang freely and spoke of Father Butler as Bunsen burner.
This description has some of the awe of a schoolboy who does not or not yet use slang.
When we came to the smoothing iron, we arranged to see it.
But it was a failure because you must have at least three here.
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.
And yet, at other times, the narrative seems far distant from childhood.
A spirit of unruliness defused itself amongst us and under its influences, difference of culture and constitution were waved.
We banded ourselves together.
The protagonist then handles an incident in which an elderly man starts talking to him and then disappears to masturbate very well.
It turns out that such wisdom as is present in the text does not just belong to the intermittent intermittently present narrating adult,
but actually to the young boy himself. Then we have the cases over which there are arguments,
a classic example of this is Tolstoy's eighteen eighties novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, as you read this.
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.
The latest trains in Russia, by the way, are open plan. This kind of life is disappearing now,
but the point is one has very long conversations when one's in these compartments and the
whole novella is told by the man he's giving his life story to his travelling companion.
What happened in his life was that he killed his wife because he suspected her of having an affair with a musician.
Now he's opposed to sex altogether because he considers it to be corruptive of both men and women.
Now, Paul's Neshev certainly resembles an unreliable narrator.
He is repellent, quote, Every now and again he uttered strange sounds as if he was clearing his throat or beginning to laugh,
but breaking off in silence. He is a murderer, of course, and also his proposals for social reform would actually render humanity extinct.
But the liberated lady and the conservative gentleman who were initially also in the same compartment and with
whom he argues in the devil opening pages are both made to look unsatisfactory when they argue with him.
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,
which have obviously not been selected by him, but by the narrator who has chosen to reproduce his narrative.
Both of these quotations from Matthew indorse personally shivs views on celibacy.
Whether or not we read Neshev as reliable, however,
it really depends on whether we find it credible that a flesh and blood person would create an implied author who shares partnership.
Disney shares views, and we know from Tolstoy's extra literary post face to the novella that he did.
It is clear that such persons as the writers of these not notes,
not only May but positively must exist in our society when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed.
Actually, that isn't Tolstoy. It's Dostoyevsky, his contemporary on the underground man who is an opposite case of a narrator asserted
by the author to be unreliable but with a greater popular following than positive.
Quotation five. I'm a sick man. I am a spiteful man.
I'm an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.
However, I know nothing at all about my disease. I am well educated not.
I'm well educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious.
He has flashes of self-knowledge. His self-consciousness is self validating and he can amuse you.
Imagine, no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that too.
However, irritated by all this babble. And I feel that you are irritated.
You think fit to ask me who I am, then my answer is I am a collegiate assessor.
One almost expects to hear I am John Wilmont, second Earl of Rochester, his poetic predecessor.
That is in his opening words. He both is and is not unreliable, a rhetorical equivalent of the logical paradox.
I am lying. Yet by the end,
when he justifies his ill treatment of a kind prostitute and claims that we all
have a kind of loathing for real life and so can't bear to be reminded of it,
then for some readers at least, he has overstepped the mark.
Nabokov's to return to him, Lolita has generated a different kind of critical controversy.
It is a brilliant novel. The implied author gives us laughs at almost every line.
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,
is in a constantly prime state of lust. Moreover, the humour is that of the implied author, not Humbert himself.
Readers reactions to the novel vary, but some are queasy in the presence of a certain kind of subject matter,
like greatest analysis novel American Psycho,
the same might apply the supposed editor editing the prison papers of Humbert Humbert writes in his introduction Quotations six.
I have no intention to glorify H.H. No doubt he's horrible.
He is abject. He is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of etc., etc.
A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him of sins of diabolical cunning,
but how magically his singing violin can conjure up a torn dress.
A compassion for Lalita that makes us entranced with the book while still pouring its author.
That is supposedly by John Ray Junior, Ph.D.
The implied author, in fact, asks for this attitude even while here parodying this local unreliable narrator.
Nabokov himself is more direct in his nonfictional separate work on a book entitled Lolita,
Nabokov claims that people felt let down by the expectation that this would be pornography when they found literature instead.
He then goes on that my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true.
But after all, we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English.
Public school boys who, after a night of homosexual romps, have to endure the paradox of reading the ancients and expurgated versions.
This really doesn't address the point that the stablest readers with the rich sense of humour may find Humboldt's prolonged company,
particularly in the first half of the novel distasteful.
Nor really does Alfred Apple Junior, who, believe it or not, is a real person writing in 1970,
who says the problem of its alleged pornography indeed seems remote today, which I think tells us a lot about nineteen seventy.
Nabokov is also responsible for the most spectacular case of unreliable narration.
I know Pale Fire, the one I like my copy of.
This is a nine hundred and ninety nine line poem, supposedly, supposedly by an American poet called John Shade,
copiously annotated by his sometime neighbour and colleague Charles Kein boat captain.
Boat reads the poem largely in relation to the history of the deposition of a King Charles, the second,
the beloved of Sembler, his escape from Sembler and a man named Greatest Failure to assassinate him.
A reading of Shade's eccentric but otherwise undistinguished poem gives one very little basis for that reading.
Moreover, it can boast notes of self serving. It's clear that his claims of friendship with the poet are grossly self delusional.
In his introduction, Convoke describes the conditions of his writing,
the shaky little affair on which my typewriter is precariously enthroned now in this
wretched motor lodge with that carousel outside and outside my head miles away from you.
Why? All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens in Emblem.
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.
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.
And by the end of the book that reading itself is unlikely. There is vigorous, critical debate as to the ontology of this.
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.
Some argue that can boat created the poet Shade and the poem,
and some argue that Shade created can boat as his own fictional commentator, Nabokov himself favoured the Botkin reading.
But we don't have to be swayed by that. The point is that Nabokov created an ontological and interpretive conundrum.
It's a work which makes you reflect on literary criticism, inevitably with self-consciousness,
also on the nature of fiction itself and the rules which determine reality within it.
And if we're thinking in those times, unreliability can be pretty broadly defined.
Any narrator who doesn't tell the reader the whole plot instantly without withholding information is perhaps in that sense unreliable,
whereas narrative is defined as the deviation from the shortest path between the beginning and the end.
And there is, of course, an overarching unreliability in all fiction which presents itself as such.
Briony Tallis asks, How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?
Likewise, how can a reader determine what is unreliable by playing God?
Thank you.