the unreliable narrator: an introduction
Saturday 20 August 2005 | I like a cookie
It’s a lightly overcast day in Santa Fe, Saturday, smack in the middle of Indian Market weekend. I’m sitting on the living room carpet eating tiny violet Champagne grapes, which weirdly enough were the cheapest fruit at Whole Foods this week; and I’m not at all sure where to begin.
I want a fresh start—like when you begin a new journal, and with relief retire the shabby scribbled one, with all its maudlin, now-embarrassing-to-think-upon moans and whimpers, to the cupboard. You avert your eyes politely, as from the scene of a messy accident, and open grateful a clean white page, yours now fresh as rain, to mark and blot and mar.
I’m being self-deprecating, which means I’m stalling.
Right. So the first character, among all the others who will come to populate this space, is moi-même, the unreliable narrator:
Herself don’t look much like this at all anymore, but we have no more recent photograph (this one was taken by M.). But why should you believe what I say about myself? I am, after all, known chiefly for being tricksy and dissembling, most usually when it concerns my own evanescent identity.
Yet here are the blatant truths. I am: white, female, and thirty-six years old. I read somewhere that’s the order in which we notice characteristics of people we meet: race, gender, age. I don’t know what we notice next. I hope we notice pro-adaptively whether the approaching person has something pointy in her hands; but never mind that for now.
And I am a writer, helplessly, reluctantly, unstoppably, by training and vocation. Which probably explains why I’m also such a hopeless liar—or, less pejoratively, such an ardent spinner of words, weaver of fables, myths about my own life and the lives of those I love and my place in the world and in their hearts.
Think of other unreliable narrators: Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Benjy in The Sound and the Fury (or for that matter Quentin), Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, Mr. Stevens from Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. And you’ll understand why I am not, under any circumstances, to be believed about any of this.
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