Someone (else) speak on Inherent Vice..?

[alice wellintown]

When the narrative assumes Larry/Doc's POV and uses his language, it
is limited by his mind, a mind that, as Robin noted, is often confused
or forgetful or stoned. Moreover, Larry/Doc langauge, the diction,
determines the tone or attitude. Larry/Doc's tone or attitude, toward
females for example, is not the same as the implied author of the text
or Pynchon. Larry/Doc, as I noted earlier, is subjected to satire. The
unreliable narrative permits Pynchon to distance himself from the
attitudes of Larry/Doc. His, that is, Larry/Doc, is not the only
narrative voice in the text. Pynchon, as he does in several of his
works, moves freely (James Wood describes this beautifully in his How
Fiction Works), with a free style in and out and close to and away
from the character tones he creates. This distance, as Booth describes
it, is an importnat narrative tool and Pynchon is quite adept with it.
He does not, atleast not in IV, do what he does in the major Romances,
that is, he does not self-consciously commnet on his writing an
allegory or a fable or deny that he is or instruct the reader or name
himself a Judas or a Betrayer, as he does in GR for example. These
Romantic elements, so essential to Pynchon's great works, as they are
to the tradition of the American Romance, are absent from IV.


I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some
hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still
worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.




On 1/6/10, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> At the risk of beating a dead horse, I don't see this as unreliable
> narration.  You have an omniscient narrator who follows Doc.  The narrator
> reliably (to the best of my recollection) narrates things including Doc's
> perceptions (which are unreliable, as with the example below).  Though Doc's
> perceptions are unreliable, I don't see the indication that we are to take
> an older Doc to be the narrator, or that the narrator is otherwise
> unreliable, though the world he/she/it describes may be.
>
> As ever, I am happy to be corrected.
>
>
> On 1/6/10, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > This is but one of many examples of the sort of long-term-short-term
> memory >loss that comes  from chronic smoking of the chronic that Pynchon
> displays >from end to end in IV.
> >
> > It's a good example.
> >
> > 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[1]) 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.
> >
> > The narrative here, call it effaced if you prefer, is unreliable
> > because the narrative is compromised or rendered unreliable by the use
> > or chronic use of drugs. Fairly standard stuff. But Mark and Robin and
> > Robert has chimed in on this as well, have argued that the narrative,
> > while tussled or self-conscious, is still reliable. I disagree.
> >
>
>