Reliable? What kind of fiction is the Foreword?

[Terrance]

Narration is an art, not a science.  but does this mean we are
necessarily doomed to fail when we attempt to formulate principles about
it? 

novelists make choices about narrative. 

we should do well to remember that the majority of these of these
choices are choices of  degree,  and not kind. to decide that your
narrator will tell a tale in the first-person or that she will be
omnicient decides pratically nothing at all. just how omnicient shall
she be? again, to decide on firt-person narration settles little or
nothing at all. what kind of firt-person? how fully characterized? how
much aware of herself as narrator? how reliable? how unreliable? how
self-conscious? how much confined to realistic inferecne; how far
privlidged to go beyond realism? at what points will she speak the truth
adn at what points will she utter no judgement or even utter falsehood?
these questions can only be answered by referece to particular works (be
they potential works or finished ones), not by reference to fiction in
general, or the novel, or rules about point of view. 


Person: 

to say that a story is told in the first or the third person tells us
nothing of importance unless we become more precise and describe how the
particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific effects. while
it is true that the first person is sometimes unduly limiting; if the
"I" has inadequate access to necessary information, the author may be
led into improbabilities. and there are other effects that may dictate a
choice in some cases. but we can hardly hope to find useful criteria in
a distinction that throws all fiction into two, or at most three (2nd
person), heaps. in this pile we have henry esmond, a cask of
amontillado, guliver's travels, and tristram shandy. and in that one we
have vanity fair, tome jones, the ambassadors, and brave new world. but
in vanity fair and tome jones the commentary is in the first person,
often resembling the intimate effect of Tristram shandy and that of many
third-person works. and, again, the effect of the ambassadors is much
closer to that of the great first-person novels, since strether in large
part "narrates" his own story, even though he is always referred to in
the third person. 

furthermore evidence that this distinction is less important than has
often been claimed is seen in the fact that all of the following
functional distinctions apply to both first- and third- person 
narration alike. 

Dramatized and Undramatized

Observers and Narrator-Agents

Scene and Summary

Commentary

Variation and Distance

Variations in Support or Correction

Privilege

Inside View


 
In Vineland we have a third person omniscent narrator.  In chapter 1, in
typical Pynchonian fashion, the narrator
creeps out at various points and makes him/her/itself known in response
to circumstances the character(s) finds him/themselves in.  In this
instance, the first such "peeking out" of the narrative point of view
comes on p. 5, following Zoyd's conversation with Slide:
 

     "'Oh I know there's some heavy-duty hombres, badasses, spend all
day narrowly escaping death by tree, not too much patience with anything
out of the ordinary, but I've got the element of surprise.  Don't I?'
      
 'You'll see,' weary Slide advised.
      
 He sure would, but only after spending more time [...]" (italics mine)

Later on the same page, the narrator states that

"It was well into lunchtime when he got to the Log Jam, and he was
disappointed to find nobody at all from the media, just a collection of
upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped.  These
were the first of several rude updates." (again, italics mine)

Using these two examples, I'd have to say that the narrative
point-of-view peeks itself out in this opening chapter and, in so doing,
reveals to the reader that there is more to Zoyd's situation than meets
the eye, in effect alerting
the reader to some aspect of the narrative that, in time, s/he learns is
indeed true.  Although the narrator here isn't nearly as slippery as it
is in GR, a case can certainly be made that the narrator is not
deceiving the reader; in fact,
it is blunting some of the situational irony of the narration. 
Consequently, I'd have to say the narrator in Vineland, at least thus
far, is pretty reliable.
 
Tim