Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV

[alice wellintown]

My readings always improve when I discuss specific passages with the
P-List so I'm not prepared to stop talking about Zoyd or Vineland. I
ignore a lot. I deleted a lot without reading. Often, I wish I had
said something but failed to. More often, it matters little what I say
once it's read and responded to. It evokes a meaning I neither
intended nor conveyed.  It is what it is & All is Well . . .as the
Jesuits taught me, what I have done and what I have failed to do can
both buy me a first class ticket to eternal damnation. Not that I
still believe in any of that superstitious nonsense, but I'll never
need to smoke dope or take LSD to experience hallucinations and all
manner of metaphysical revelations. Don't even need to fall off Paul's
or Mason's horse. A bit like Zappa,  I was surrounded by chemicals,
not pesticides or military industrial complex chemistry but their
forebearers,  throughout my childhood. My friends, who imbibed every
drug the street could mix up were always complaining about it.
Sometimes they could see, if they paid attention, focused, relaxed,
let it be. But most of the time they didn't have the fortitude or the
patience. Imagine going to see Fear & Loathing with Alice whose been
in wonderland all her life. No burnt throat, no windowpane Windex
brain, no hangover, no Jones, no crawling under a truck and howling at
the unborn angels riding the dynamos of despair out to Brooklyn and
Colorado for fixes and visions  illuminated, never.

You can blame me or you or the man in the moon. It's as cool as you
need it to be.

> 1) I did not conflate even my misreading with the author's norms yet...I was just starting to define Doc's character.

We should work at this. I started when I noted how Doc got his name.

> 2) Yes, he does want an endless summer. Reliable, unreliable? So far, we have to take it straight AND even having finished the book, using other unreliable narrators as touchstones, ones who GET THE FACTS IN THEIR LIVES WRONG----The Good Soldier; The Remains of The Day---Doc is not that kind of unreliable narrator.

Unreliable Narrator is such a confusing term so I'll need to turn to
Wiki. When I use the term I'm using in the sense defined by Booth.
Same goes for "implied author" and "author's norms."

[Booth's] major work was The Rhetoric of Fiction. In this book, Booth
argues that all narrative is a form of rhetoric, that is, an argument
on the part of author in defense of his or her "various commitments,
secret or overt [that] determine our response to the work".   The
majority of these commitments are based on morals and morality, Booth
argues. The speaker in narrative is the author or, more specifically,
the implied author, which Booth also calls an author's "second self"
who "chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him
as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum
of his own choices"
The implied author is a compromise between old-fashioned biographical
criticism, the new critics who argued that one can only talk about
what the text says, and modern criticism that argued for the
"eradication" of authorial presence. Booth argued that it is
impossible to talk about a text without talking about an author,
because the existence of the text implies the existence of an author.
Booth's argument was, particularly, a response to modern critics who,
starting from Henry James, emphasized the difference between "showing"
and "telling" in fiction, always placing a premium on the importance
of "showing." Such a distinction is deeply flawed according to Booth,
for authors routinely both show and tell, deciding which technique to
use based on their aesthetic decisions about which way to convey their
"commitments." Authors often make their own contributions in their
works, and they also include those of narrators, whether reliable,
unreliable, partial or impartial. Booth notes the important
differences among these contributors, however, pointing out that the
author is distinct from the narrator of the text. He uses the examples
of stories with an unreliable narrator to prove this point, observing
that, in these stories, the whole point of the story is lost if one
confuses narrator and author.
In fiction, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in
his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a narrator whose credibility
has been seriously compromised. The use of this type of narrator is
called unreliable narration and is a narrative mode that can be
developed by the author for a number of reasons, though usually to
make a negative statement about the narrator. This unreliability can
be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of
knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or
audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but
third-person narrators can also be unreliable.
"I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in
accordance with the norms of the work [...] unreliable when he does
not" (158-59). Later in Booth's explanation it becomes clear that the
concept of unreliable narration refers to narrators who are "morally
and intellectually deficient" (307).


IV has an unreliable third-person limited narrator.

An excellent example of the third-person-limited and unreliable
narrator is Wright's Native Son.
Wright uses this narrative technique to get the reader close to the
protagonist. Since the point of the novel reveals the mind of a
dehumanized black man cornered in the ghetto, the reader must identify
with Bigger Thomas. Wright wanted readers to understand how hostile
the American environment is to those who have already been excluded
based on skin color.  But Wright did not want readers to miss the
ironies that Bigger doesn't see or get. Bigger sees that he has been
accused and convicted  of murdering and raping a white girl simply
because he is a black man.  And, of course, Wright expects the reader
to know that when Bigger murders and rapes his girl friend, a black
girl, crushing her head with a brick and stuffing her body in a duct,
he has committed a crime far worse than his murder of Mary. That the
Bigger doesn't care or see they hypocrisy in this but one example of
his unreliable narrative. We have to read for the norms of the text
and not be sucked in by the protagonist-narrator no matter how
brilliant and charming He (Humbert Humbert) may be.