pynchon-l-digest V2 #7335

[alice wellintown]

Cherrycoke narrates sections of M&D.
He is one of the narrators.
He is unreliable.
Why is this so difficult to understand?
We know that Cherrycoke's narrative is suspect from the start, his
motives for telling his tales, his painting himself into historical
events he could not have been present for, his painting himself in a
favorable light, his arguments about fictions and histories and how
they should be handled. His didactic and even subversive motives; his
audience and their role, the competing narratives and other lements of
the works that contradict or at least cast serious doubt on his
reliability. On and on...unreliable.




On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 5:11 AM, Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:
>> Cherrycoke is another unreliable narrator.
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> Oh, ok then!
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> Isn't it even harder than usual to deal with a term like 'unreliable narrator', when who or what is the 'narrator' is in itself pretty hard to pin down? Who, for instance, is the narrator of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'? With Pynchon - as pointed out by John Bailey - it's often very hard to say, and there is often a 'kaleidoscopic' narrator. In IV, there's what appears to be (or what cal be taken as) a little narratorial blip right at the start, as we watch Shasta come up the steps, as if from an omniscient point of view, before snapping into a sort of 'Doc's point of view' for much of the remainder of the book. However we dice the general term 'unreliable narrator', I don't think it fits Doc, not just because he is not literally the narrator. The idea that his dope smoking might make him unreliable is an interesting one, but ultimately I don't think that really fits either - even leaving aside the question of how stoned he is most of the time.
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