unreliable narrators

[alice wellintown]

Who narrates Coy's history in this chapter? THE relaible narrator?
That excahnge at the bottom of pg. 302 seems pretty importnat to me.
Like outside their own head, dude. Seem P is telling us something
about these so-called reliable narratives here, including the one that
appears to be a relaible narrative with privledge. It holds like piece
of the real cross wedged into the hole in the hold. That's as close as
we get to holding in a P novel.


On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
> On Dec 12, 2009, at 10:37 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Right. The place where we disagree, as noted in a prior post, is that
>> I call Oedipa and Larry/Doc narrators.
>
> This just doesn't hold up.  I n this chapter for example the narrator
> follows Denis then Shasta and sees and observes things that Doc doesn't:
> "For Shasta this was often the best part of the day, busy with early
> deliveries, ...-still cool, smelling like the desert after rain, garden
> exotics, shadows everywhere to shelter in for  a bit before the day's empty
> sky asserted itself." p. 310
>>
>> They are not merely characters
>> that a traditional reliable narrator has "privledge" to (Booth). When
>> a narrative, like Larry/Doc's so "tinges" the narrative proper, we can
>> not continue to discuss this as a tinge or even as privledge.
>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>
>