unreliable?

[Burns, Erik]

foax:

malignD wrote:

>The unreliable narrator simply works a vein of
>separation between what the author knows, what he
>allows his reader to know, and what he allows his
>narrator to know.  The narrator's unreliability may
>owe no psychological reason, only the author's
>withholding of a vista afforded the reader.

seems to me the U.N. (heh.) is not part of the usual authorial effort to
slowly unveil the plot, to tell the story. to achieve this in any way by
definition some information must be withheld from the beginning and spooled
out. that's not the point. in Kinbote's case it's a different effect: part
of the plot itself is Kinbote's unreliability, his misreading of his world,
his mistelling of his tale. or not, as it were. I don't think VN is even
bothering too much with this point - _Pale Fire_ is, after all, first and
foremost a riff on academe and the big joke is not that Kinbote is
unreliable (or demented) but that his dementia takes the form of
ur-reliability, the highbrow annotations to a poem, making that whole kind
of scheme forever after unreliable (or at least questionable).

in Pynchon I think there is a different mechanism at work, ambiguity. What
is true is that while his characters (and I'm thinking in the main of _V._,
_The Crying of Lot 49_ and _Gravity's Rainbow_ here) are increasingly aware
of a "plot" (in the paranoid conspiratorial sense of it) around them, the
narrator remains ambiguous - you get the same information as the characters,
feel the same chill, but are never outright told "Hey Yeah The Tristero, Man
They Run Everything Now." Fortunately.

etb