unreliable?

[jbor]

on 19/6/03 1:36 AM, 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.

There's a bit of a non-sequitur in the first sentence, but that's about
right. In this sense it's a narrative strategy, the deliberate creation of a
narrator or narrative voice in the text which is not aligned to the author
as "the centre of consciousness", in James's terms. Kinbote is an example.
Pynchon moves one step beyond this, I think, and contests this idea of a
stable or reliable "centre of consciousness" which is vouchsafed from author
to reader.

best