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On the connection between narrative knowledge and narrative reliability
Note: The following essay received an A at Harvard University Summer School
Intuitively
one tends to assume that the knowledge a narrator has is necessarily directly proportional
to the extent to which a reader can trust the narration[1]. This paper will analyse this
intuition by arguing that whilst it is true in some cases, exemplified in A
day’s wait; in other circumstances our intuition is problematic, as shown
in Car crash while hitchhiking. Therefore, the validity of the narrator’s
epistemological skills is not always connected with the reliability of what he
is saying.
Hemingway’s
narrator introduces the reader to two main sources of knowledge: to reminiscence
of past sensory experience and to logical thinking, both of which are equated
with his reliability, thus providing evidence for the initial intuition. The
former kind of knowledge is expressed when the narrator says: “‘Something like
a hundred’, I said. It was a hundred and two and four tenths”. This quotation includes
two verbs conjugated in the past tense (“said” and “was”), which indicate that
the action has already finished by the time the narrator is reporting the
events and therefore A day’s wait is a retrospective narration. So the
father has no present experience of taking Schatz’s temperature, but the memory
of having done so. This consequently means that the method through which he
obtains that knowledge which he now shares with the reader must be through reminiscence.
As for the narrator’s reliability, although the presence of the word
“something” in this quotation does imply that the narrator is uncertain about
the temperature, this initial reaction is soon challenged by an accurate
description of the temperature: “one hundred and two and four tenths”. Given
that the speaker remembers the exact temperature, the reader must assume that
the cause of this apparent inaccuracy stems from the narrator’s decision not to
tell Schatz the whole truth concerning his temperature, as opposed to from a
lack of knowledge. So despite the fact that the narrator is not sharing the
precise information with his son, he is accurately doing so with the reader.
Consequently, this passage shows that the reader can trust the narrator’s testimony.
The
second source of knowledge for Hemingway’s narrator is his logical thinking. When
Schatz asks “about what time do you think I’m going to die?”, the father
reaches the conclusion that “He had been waiting to die all day, ever since
nine o’clock in the morning”. Based on his son’s odd behaviour throughout the
whole day[2], this piece of dialogue makes
the narrator use abductive reasoning to grant him knowledge. He comes up with
the most plausible explanation: the cause of Schatz’s fatalistic attitude was his
preoccupation with mortality. With regards to his reliability as narrator, the
correctness of his conclusion provides the reader with enough information to
understand the cause of Schatz’s behaviour. Based on the speaker’s conclusion,
the reader can now reread the story and connect Schatz’s attitude with his
preoccupation with death. Thus with this piece of information, the reader can
now understand sentences with incomplete syntax such as “I can’t keep from
thinking” (about death). The reader’s newly acquired knowledge about Schatz helps
him understand his behaviour. Hemingway takes the reader in the same epistemic
journey the narrator goes through. The reader’s knowledge corresponds to that
of the narrator and the truth of the latter’s knowledge helps the former make
causal sense of the events through the same logical mechanism: abduction. So in
this story the narrator’s possession of epistemic methods, such as reminiscence
and logical thinking, coincides with his reliability and thus the
abovementioned intuition works.
Johnson’s
tale presents an unreliable narrator. This is evidenced by the disconnectedness
of the text. The following piece of dialogue demonstrates that there is a lack of
narrative clarity in what he is saying: “‘Are you hearing unusual sounds or
voices?’ the doctor asked. ‘Help us, oh God, it hurts’ the boxes of cotton
screamed. ‘Not exactly’ I said”. He does not tell the truth to the doctor,
instead he ambiguously offers a false account of his experience. The personification
of the boxes implies that the speaker is indeed hearing voices in his head. The
reader does not get any sort of explanation as to why the boxes of cotton seem
in pain or why the narrator is the only one to hear them[3]. The image feels random
and is left unexplored and disconnected from the rest of the scene, opening the
possibility of madness. These inaccuracies make the reader wonder whether he
can believe anything of what the narrator is saying at all. Furthermore, the
story closes with a pastoral image of nature that has nothing to do with the
hospital and serves no particular purpose: “It was raining. Gigantic ferns
leaned over us (…)”. The appearance of the first person of the plural form implies
there is more than one person in that final image. However, the reader is not
told who that other person or those other people are or why they are with the
narrator in this landscape, which again provides the narrative with an aura of disconnectedness
and a lack of clarity.
If
our intuition that a narrator’s knowledge is directly to proportional to his
reliability is correct, having established that the narrator of Car crash
while hitchhiking is unreliable it should follow that he also lacks
knowledge. Nonetheless, this is not the case and thus there are no grounds to
defend the existence of such a necessary correlation in this story. The narrator can be
interpreted as someone in possession of some sort of inexplicable knowledge. In
the line “and you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you”, in which
he speaks directly to the reader, the word “ridiculous” implies that the
narrator pictures himself living in a different realm of reality which puts him
in a position to insult the reader, depriving the reader’s existence any sense
of purpose. Following what Nietzsche[4] would call a master’s
morality, he looks down on humanity and imposes his own set of wills and values
upon it. He believes that he has acquired a status which separates him from the
non-teleological lives of human beings. This state corresponds to Nietzsche’s concept
of the Übermensch. If the narrator is in an intellectually superior position to
that of the reader, he must have a type of higher-level knowledge which the
reader cannot possibly have[5]. I would venture so far as
to say that such a knowledge is that of being a character inside a story. Johnson’s
plot depicts a reality in which what Nietzsche considers to be the ultimate
step of human evolution consists of being part of a work of fiction. Such a
realm cannot be expressed in words; it must be experienced. It is the one thing
that the reader cannot know but that a fictional narrator can know. Readers do
“expect” narrators to “help” them understand the plots, but this narrator is
aware that that cannot happen here because he cannot explain what it is like to
live in such a different epistemological world[6]; that of pure art
or what Nietzsche would call “the sublime”. His knowledge does not correspond
to what the reader is able to know, which explains the unreliability of his
narration. As a result, Johnson’s story demonstrates that there can actually be
an unreliable but yet highly knowledgeable narrator.
To
conclude, although there are cases in which a narrator’s knowledge directly
corresponds to the extent to which a reader can trust what he is saying, this
relationship does not always work. So it must be concluded that a narrator’s
knowledge is not an infallible indicator of narrative reliability. There is a
degree of independence between these two concepts. Both factors may coincide
sometimes but, contrary to the initial intuition, one cannot trace a pattern between
them that applies to all cases.
Word
count: 1491
Fernando
Martinez-Periset
Harvard
University
[1]
In other words, the more knowledgeable the narrator, the more
trustworthy he is and vice versa; for it seems intuitively absurd (at least to
me) to suppose that a story can have a reliable narrator who knows nothing
about the events being told or an unreliable narrator who knows everything
about the plot, assuming the texts are non-deceptive .
[2]
For example, he refuses to let
anyone in his room and he asks his father to leave if it “is going to bother
him” (to see him die).
[4]
As an anecdote, my hairdresser
who is absolutely insane has been lecturing me on Nietzsche’s philosophy for
years!
[5]
It’s a world in which Hume-ans
Kant drive De-cars without Russelling
[6]
As Thomas Nagel points out,
there is no way of knowing ‘what it is like’ to be a bat. His illustration
applies to this case too. The reader cannot know ‘what it is like’ to be a
character inside a story.
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