unreliable narrators

[Mark Kohut]

I use it in the same way, yet many varieties of 'unreliablity' exist. 

First, most of p's novels have an authorial narrator who is merged with a leading character. This voice sees straight and seldom reports events differently than we have experienced them throguh the narrator.

And, i cannot believe we are---i am---talking about ALL PYNCHON'S NARRATORS in one post....Such analysis, criticism is particiular or it 
is balloon gas.....

So, again, Doc gets it right over and over. Which is why when his voice merges with the larger one---the end---we believe it straight. [fog, what's been lost, etc.]

--- On Thu, 12/10/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: unreliable narrators
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009, 8:27 PM
> As I noted in previous posts, when I
> use the term, I use it as it was
> first used and defined by Booth.
> 
> In fiction (as implemented in literature, film, theatre,
> etc.) 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.
> 
> 
> All of Pynchon's novels have unreliable narrators.
>