unreliable narrators (Start with V.)

[alice wellintown]

Pynchon's very first novel features unreliable narration.

As Sweeney argues in this very insightful article on V., Pynchon's use
of unreliable narrative is evident in his first novel.

In both novels, the detective’s obsession makes him unreliable.
Stencil’s narration is the most significant change that Pynchon made
in “Under the Rose” when he transformed it — after reading Sebastian
Knight, I believe — into the third chapter of V. The short story
matter-of-factly presents the events surrounding a secret agent’s
death in Egypt in 1899. The chapter filters those same events through
several points of view, just as Nabokov’s narrator embeds various
versions of Sebastian in his biography. As in Nabokov’s novel,
moreover, it turns out that those perspectives may have been forged by
the narrator. Despite the verisimilitude of the events he narrates,
Stencil admits that his only evidence is a few “veiled references” in
his father’s journals; the rest is “impersonation and dream” (52).

http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1475
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney  :
The V-Shaped Paradigm: Nabokov and Pynchon