unreliable narrators

[Mark Kohut]

If Tore is too generous to close the case, I pronounce 
CASE CLOSED:
the limited omniscient point of view narrative limits narration to what can be known, seen, thought, or judged from a single character's perspective. Thus, the narration is limited in the same way a first person narrative might be, but the text is in third person. 

Henry James, who used the third person limited omniscient narrative in his novel The Ambassadors and coined the phrase "effaced narration" to describe it, believed this could create high art, and contemporary literary writers seem to agree. The effaced narrator dominates contemporary literary art. James pointed out that in effaced narration, the art consisted of varying the reader's psychological distance from the action, bringing the reader in close for high drama, and further out for ordinary events. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_person_limited_omniscient [Dec 2006] 






--- On Sat, 12/12/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: unreliable narrators
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, December 12, 2009, 3:47 AM
> 
> Alice:
> 
>  
> > Here is more: turn to pp. 22-25 of McHale's
> Postmodrnisr Fiction,
> > wherein he explains why Oedipa's narrative is
> unrelaible.
> 
> [...]
>  
> > IV, much like CL49, features an unreliable narrative.
> Larry questions
> > his own Projections, his own solipsisms as Oediap does
> in CL49.
> >
> > Case closed.
> 
> Case reopened: McHale's argument (and your own) rests on
> considering Larry 
> and Oedipa to be the narrators of their own stories. McHale
> does indeed 
> question Oedipa's reliability as a witness, and rightly so.
> Oedipa's 
> projections certainly are unreliable, I won't argue with
> that, but the
> narrative perspective is, as I have said, not identical
> with Oedipa's. Even
> McHale acknowledges this, when he says that there are "a
> few discreet
> deviations toward narratorial omniscience in early
> chapters" (p. 23). I 
> would argue that those deviations are not as few and
> discreet as McHale 
> says, and they can certainly also be found in later
> chapters. You'll
> not find me arguing that there is no uncertainty in Lot 49.
> Uncertainty 
> and ambiguity are if anything the dominant moods of the
> novel, as for 
> instance Thomas Schaub has argued.
>  
> At any rate, if I were to describe the narratorial
> situation in Lot 49, I 
> would say that the novel has a single extradiegetical
> narrator, whose 
> perspective most of the time is located close to the main
> character. I 
> wouldn't term this narrator omniscient, since we don't get
> into any other 
> characters' minds than Oedipa's. But even though the
> narrative perspective
> is close to Oedipa's, it remains distinct from her. As I
> have said, Oedipa
> is a character, not a narrator, and the same goes for Doc.
> And even though
> their stories are suffused with uncertainty, even though
> their perceptions
> are unreliable, the narrator remains distinct from them: He
> has the ability
> to enter their minds and uses this ability to tell their
> story, but this
> doesn't make him unreliable. 
>  
> In short, the extradiegetical narrator provides a reliable
> narrative of the 
> unreliability of the main characters' perceptions and
> projections. If the 
> narrator were unreliable, we would also have to question
> his depiction of 
> those main characters and their unreliability. We might
> even ask ourselves
> whether Oedipa was a reliable witness, after all. But we
> don't ask that
> question, because we implicitly believe in the narrator's
> depiction of her
> unreliability. And we believe that because the narrator is
> reliable.
>  
> Case closed? Not necessarily, but I find it crucial to
> uphold the distinction
> between what is told and who is telling it. A story of
> unreliability
> can easily be told by a reliable narrator, who remains
> distinct from the
> unreliable characters, even though his narrative is
> occasionally tinged by 
> their perspective.
>  
> All best
>  
> Tore
>      
>         
>           
>   
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