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.  

A Plan of Action

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I'm getting a jump on next week; I just checked the course site, and Toffee has posted the journal prompt for week 9 of the semester.  She wants us to talk about how we "want to compose" our essays.  This is kind of an interesting idea.  I've never written about what I plan to write, unless you count outlining, which she says not to do for this entry.

I think I actually started doing this in the last couple of entries.  I selected Nathan Heller's review/article about the film because it's representative of all the reviews that complained about Sherlock Holmes being too action-oriented to be faithful to the Conan Doyle stories.  I'm thinking now that the point I brought up last time about Watson might just explain the difference; I talked to my father about it, and he agrees (gave me a few good ideas, too).  In all but a couple of the stories, Watson is the narrator, and we see everything from his point of view.  For a former army officer, Watson is also pretty stuffy and judgmental -- a real Victorian, according to my dad -- and it's clear in the stories I've read so far that he doesn't tell us everything he knows that we would like to know, too.  That bit I quoted from "The Musgrave Ritual" is a good example, and I think I'll use that story as my main comparison with the film.  He also brushes over a lot of action, especially travel.  SH really gets around, according to Watson, but the doctor just says that they went from point A to point B (and sometimes the whole rest of the alphabet) without giving any of the details of the trips or describing the places they travel through.  The film, however, does NOT use Watson's point of view, and now that I think of it, I guess I've never seen a SH film that does (and thanks to my dad, I've seen plenty).   I read something in one of my sources, which I guess I'll have to find now, about Watson being an "unreliable narrator."  That seems to sum up the problem I see.  He has his own personality quirks that lead him to criticize Holmes for various things and to praise Holmes for things that he (Watson, that is) approves of.  Watson isn't ever going to talk about things he thinks should not be talked about in public, and he's not going to tell us stuff that he thinks we should already know, like what Mayfair looks like as opposed to Stepney (which he does describe, in "The Six Napoleons"). 

So, it appears that my thesis is being revised already!  I'm not sure how to word it, but it's something like how everything Heller is noting as a deviation from the stories is only a deviation if you believe that Watson's point of view is the only point of view that matters.  Well, this is going to take more thought than I thought it would.

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