Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Unreliable Narrators

Well, I found out a lot about unreliable narrators in a hurry, but I had to go to another school to see the books I needed.  I photocopied the parts I needed, and I think I got everything that mattered.  The best one, for me at least, was one Dr. Toffee recommended, The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne Booth.  This is an old book (1961!), but it had what I needed and I could understand it without having to read it five times, which was what happened with a couple of things I looked at when I first started researching.  I also found a couple of books that I might have tried to use if I'd found them sooner, but they were way too intense-- it would have taken too long for me to get anything useful out of them.  
It appears that Dr. Watson can be classified as an unreliable narrator, and he's not like others that Booth mentions, because he seems really, really reliable.  We don't even suspect him of being unreliable.  However, he's unreliable in a weird way:  he doesn't seem to be hiding anything to protect our good opinion of him, but simply to be ignoring things that we would find of interest.  He wouldn't see himself as unreliable.  
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