unreliable narrators

[Joseph Tracy]

"Unreliable narrator" is a term that should be used carefully. All  
fiction is made up stories and historically unreliable as to the  
fictional events described. While several novels i have read worked  
more as meditations on language, consciousness, myth etc than as  
stories, very few legitimize the term "unreliable narrator". The one  
that comes to my  mind most clearly is Delillo's Americana in which  
the first person narrator is clearly doing a fair amount of lying.  
The author intends you to become aware that a narrator can lie and  
the effect is jarring.

I do not see the term "unreliable narrator" as being  meaningful  
apart from first person narration, history, or journalism.  A person  
can lie but  a narrator can only invent.   The contract is different.  
The fictional narrator doesn't expect you to believe his stories as  
factually true but as emotionally and intellectually  meaningful and  
that requires that the reader "suspends disbelief" , that the events  
of the story become true within the context of the story.

The Book of Daniel presents itself as prophecy covering hundreds of  
years of history , claiming to be written  before those events  
occurred in  6th C Babylon. It was really written in the 2nd century.  
It  is inaccurate about Babylon and gets more accurate as it gets  
closer to the 2nd Century. Because of the way it presents itself this  
is closer to a journalist lying  than Delillo's book but his book   
warns us about narrative deception such as we find in  Daniel or  
false histories.

The issue of reliability  and truth telling in works  of fiction is a  
question of artfulness, skill and authorial integrity. Apart from  
first person narration, to  label  the narrative voice as unreliable  
is to say the author is intending to deceive the reader and not be  
caught or questioned. Otherwise a work of fiction becomes inscrutably  
meaningless. If the narrator says a stoned or delusional Doc "sees" a  
building in the shape of a fang we can doubt the reality in the story  
of that building, but if the narrator says "there is " a building in  
the shape of a fang , then that is what exists in the LA of the story  
and is a necessary component of the reality of that story.

A big part of what makes for great writing has to do with the  
integrity of that contract, and the emotional,  the intellectual and  
also the subconscious credibility of what happens inside that contract.