unreliable? in Vineland

[jbor]

>>> A more valid question might be whether there are any truly "reliable
>>> narrators" in Pynchon's work.

on 19/6/03 11:28 AM, Tim Strzechowski at dedalus204 at attbi.com wrote:

> 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.

Note how narration is filtered through Zoyd's pov in the third paragraph:
"With enough Nestle's Quik on top, they weren't all that bad ... " This is
Zoyd's opinion expressed through the narrative voice.

But I do agree that articulation of narrative is more consistent in Vineland
than it is in either _GR_ or _M&D_. However, the spanner in the works here
is that the narrative voice makes no distinction at all between historical
actualities, like the movie 'Return of the Jedi', the Vietnam War or
Reaganomics, and absolute fantasy, like Thanatoids, "real" Godzilla
footprints and supersonic alien aircraft. Setting itself up as a "reliable"
omniscient narrator narrating a more or less realistic plot, neither the
tone nor the telling betrays the outlandishness of some of the events being
narrated, nor of these juxtapositions. Calling it a "reliable narrator" or
"reliable" narration doesn't seem to be a particularly apt or useful way of
describing what's going on in the novel, all things considered.

best