pynchon-l-digest V2 #7335

[alice wellintown]

No, not all narrators are unreliable.  All of P's novels, however,
feature unreliable narration. I have provided clear and explicit
examples and academic readings of the what "Unreliable narration"
means. I have provided several seconday sources, from the most
respected critics of Pynchon, to support my claim. I have provided
evidence from the texts.


Here is more: turn to pp. 22-25 of McHale's Postmodrnisr Fiction,
wherein he explains why Oedipa's narrative is unrelaible.

So, V., CL49, M&D, VL, all feature unreliable narrative, as defined by Booth.
I tabled GR, but others are freee to argue.

IV, much like CL49, features an unreliable narrative. Larry questions
his own Projections, his own solipsisms as Oediap does in CL49.

Case closed.

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> On Dec 11, 2009, at 5:24 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>  Of course there is no God's eye view of anything, or at least none that we
> mortals have access to. This makes all narratives unreliable as regards some
> theoretical absolute truth about what happens.
> Perhaps that is the central appeal of fiction . It being the one place where
> there is a true story within the bounds of its world, because its
> "creator/god/author" is a person like the reader who lives in a narrative of
> his/her own making.
> If Pynchon is deliberately undermining the convention that a 3rd person
> narrator doesn't "lie" about events in the story being told, and therefore
> breaking down the barriers between the real and unreal and between  history,
>  realistic fiction and myth and provoking us to question all frames, all
> narratives, then this unreliability has consequences that ultimately make
> all traditional methods of literary analysis exercises in self delusion.
> This would seem to undermine the very idea of a more relatively accurate
> reading. And that is an idea which you seem to favor and contend for along
> with many others. The problem being that any interpretation of any event
> becomes impossible if both the event and all events surrounding it may not
> even be true events within the story.
>
> For me, Cherrycoke is the most reliable kind of narrator because I know he
> is not "God" and that he is telling a version of the story he likes , and
> that "truth" and "meaning" is something that is up to me.
>
> This is nice in that I am not accountable to literary high priests as
> interpreters, and discomfiting (but not so bad) for me because my reading is
> also just another unreliable narrative.
>
> Anyway this whole exercise is pretty interesting and unsettling and opens
> new doors.
>
> So far I am unable to find a clear evidence of unreliability in the
> narrative voice of IV. Pynchon even goes to pains to do a kind of Biblical
> thing (One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity , or for
> any sin, in any sin that he sinneth : at the mouth of two witnesses , or at
> the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established. Deu 19:15)of
> letting every key fact or piece of evidence have several  firsthand
> witnesses. Example:  Police records, Bigfoot, Fritz all point to A Prussia's
> nefarious activities. This is a consistent pattern.
>
>
>
>> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 5:11 AM, Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com>
>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Cherrycoke is another unreliable narrator.
>>>
>>> Oh, ok then!
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>