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Unreliable Narrators
Aug. 12th, 2023 09:34 amFinished listening to Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine on yesterday’s tromp.
I should probably refrain from having any kind of opinion about the novel until I actually track down a copy to read.
Listening to an audiobook is a qualitatively different experience than reading a novel, and Cathleen McCarron, who read Eleanor Oliphant, is such an outstanding vocal actress that I may have imagined textual tonalities where none exist based on McCarron’s interpretation.
But what I came away thinking after listening to the novel was that Eleanor Oliphant is actually a literary chimera, two novels that had fused in the author’s imagination in a very early stage of development, thus turning the titular character into the quintessential unreliable narrator.
I liked one of the novels quite a bit. Was meh about the other.
The novel I liked was about a young woman who is very intelligent but clearly On the Spectrum and thus makes any number of fascinating and humorous observations about the world around her.
The novel I was meh about was the tragic story of a young woman, horribly abused as a child, who is prone to inconsistent memories and, four-fifths of the way through the book, tries to drink herself to death. (She is rescued.)
I dunno. The tragic story just kinda made me wrinkle my nose and think, Why? How does giving the protagonist a bleak and tragic backstory make her a stronger character?
I imagine this reflects my own biases: Personally, I find neurodiversity more interesting than family dysfunction.
Though, of course, as a writer of fiction myself, I’m familiar with the process whereby characters, once created, do exactly what they want to do. If they want a certain backstory, they’ll fabricate it—authorial intent be damned.
This is very difficult to explain to people who don’t write fiction. But you’re the one writing it! they point out sensibly enough. You’re the one controlling it!
Which is true.
But at the same time… not true.
###
I had my own Adventure In Unreliable Narration last night when Neighbor Ed pointed out inconsistencies in one of my more vivid childhood memories.
We were playing that game: Where were you when JFK was shot?
“I was climbing up the stairs from the IRT subway station next to the Brooklyn Museum,” I said. “I was coming up the stairs, two women were coming down, and they were crying. ‘The President’s been shot!’ they told me.”
Neighbor Ed stared at me in mock opprobrium. “And why weren’t you in school, young lady?”
(He hadn’t asked what might seem like the more appropriate question: Why were you, at the age of 12, traveling the subways alone?
I’d been traveling the subways alone since I was seven.)
“Uh—because it was Thanksgiving!” I said brightly. “November 22, 1963!”
Neighbor Ed raised his eyebrows, consulted the iPhone oracle. “Syrie, what date was Thanksgiving in 1963? Nope, in 1963, Thanksgiving fell on November 28.” He shook his head. “That a granddaughter of Alfred Tennyson Vogel—head of the English Department at Seward Park High School and the man who forced me to read Moby Dick at the tender age of 15, thereby inculcating in me a lifelong hatred of classic American literature—could have been cutting school.” He grinned at me. “Or are you confabulating, my dear?”
I felt chagrinned.
I wasn’t confabulating: The memory is crystal clear.
It’s a sense memory as well as a notch on a timeline.
I can recall what the two women were wearing (Lady One: below-the-knee red dress with white polka dots; Lady Two: below-the-knee blue dress with white stripes), the smell of the underground station as I emerged from it (stale cigarette smoke, staler urine, whiff of autumn leaves), and even a wad of gum stuck to the stairs that I had the presence of mind to step around.
And I loved school. Hunter was my great escape from home. I never cut school once the entire six years I spent at Hunter. (Hunter High School used an archaic enrollment model that spanned grades 7 through 12.)
Could Hunter have had an unusual holiday schedule and given us a week off for the Thanksgiving holiday?
Or maybe the aliens implanted the memory to distract me from the anal probe?
I dunno!
But the exchange with Neighbor Ed was disconcerting.
Here’s me while I was a student at Hunter High School:
I should probably refrain from having any kind of opinion about the novel until I actually track down a copy to read.
Listening to an audiobook is a qualitatively different experience than reading a novel, and Cathleen McCarron, who read Eleanor Oliphant, is such an outstanding vocal actress that I may have imagined textual tonalities where none exist based on McCarron’s interpretation.
But what I came away thinking after listening to the novel was that Eleanor Oliphant is actually a literary chimera, two novels that had fused in the author’s imagination in a very early stage of development, thus turning the titular character into the quintessential unreliable narrator.
I liked one of the novels quite a bit. Was meh about the other.
The novel I liked was about a young woman who is very intelligent but clearly On the Spectrum and thus makes any number of fascinating and humorous observations about the world around her.
The novel I was meh about was the tragic story of a young woman, horribly abused as a child, who is prone to inconsistent memories and, four-fifths of the way through the book, tries to drink herself to death. (She is rescued.)
I dunno. The tragic story just kinda made me wrinkle my nose and think, Why? How does giving the protagonist a bleak and tragic backstory make her a stronger character?
I imagine this reflects my own biases: Personally, I find neurodiversity more interesting than family dysfunction.
Though, of course, as a writer of fiction myself, I’m familiar with the process whereby characters, once created, do exactly what they want to do. If they want a certain backstory, they’ll fabricate it—authorial intent be damned.
This is very difficult to explain to people who don’t write fiction. But you’re the one writing it! they point out sensibly enough. You’re the one controlling it!
Which is true.
But at the same time… not true.
###
I had my own Adventure In Unreliable Narration last night when Neighbor Ed pointed out inconsistencies in one of my more vivid childhood memories.
We were playing that game: Where were you when JFK was shot?
“I was climbing up the stairs from the IRT subway station next to the Brooklyn Museum,” I said. “I was coming up the stairs, two women were coming down, and they were crying. ‘The President’s been shot!’ they told me.”
Neighbor Ed stared at me in mock opprobrium. “And why weren’t you in school, young lady?”
(He hadn’t asked what might seem like the more appropriate question: Why were you, at the age of 12, traveling the subways alone?
I’d been traveling the subways alone since I was seven.)
“Uh—because it was Thanksgiving!” I said brightly. “November 22, 1963!”
Neighbor Ed raised his eyebrows, consulted the iPhone oracle. “Syrie, what date was Thanksgiving in 1963? Nope, in 1963, Thanksgiving fell on November 28.” He shook his head. “That a granddaughter of Alfred Tennyson Vogel—head of the English Department at Seward Park High School and the man who forced me to read Moby Dick at the tender age of 15, thereby inculcating in me a lifelong hatred of classic American literature—could have been cutting school.” He grinned at me. “Or are you confabulating, my dear?”
I felt chagrinned.
I wasn’t confabulating: The memory is crystal clear.
It’s a sense memory as well as a notch on a timeline.
I can recall what the two women were wearing (Lady One: below-the-knee red dress with white polka dots; Lady Two: below-the-knee blue dress with white stripes), the smell of the underground station as I emerged from it (stale cigarette smoke, staler urine, whiff of autumn leaves), and even a wad of gum stuck to the stairs that I had the presence of mind to step around.
And I loved school. Hunter was my great escape from home. I never cut school once the entire six years I spent at Hunter. (Hunter High School used an archaic enrollment model that spanned grades 7 through 12.)
Could Hunter have had an unusual holiday schedule and given us a week off for the Thanksgiving holiday?
Or maybe the aliens implanted the memory to distract me from the anal probe?
I dunno!
But the exchange with Neighbor Ed was disconcerting.
Here’s me while I was a student at Hunter High School:
