Speaking of narration, I did look up the type of view Mr. Stevens in The Remains of the Day is telling his story, and it was described as unreliable first-person. Fine. I am not sure if I agree with the unreliable part. If an author is using a character to tell the character’s own story then what is unreliable about it. The version of their story told by them cannot be told by anyone else, there is no more reliable version of their personal telling of their story than the one they tell us. I mean, it’s their opinion, man. Who am I to say they aren’t telling the way they see it correctly. Mind you, that is not the same as agreeing with the way they see it.
It’s hard not to take a philosophical view of the thing, but there it is. As I like to tell my children, it’s all made up. Everything with a name or explanation we experience as humans was made up by us at one time or another. Numbers, colors, bus routes, blame. All made up. So whose’s the reliable narrator of anything?
Wonderful character development in the hands of a master such as Mr. Ishiguro makes me weep even more over the miss use of free indirect style and multiple first-person character views that switch every chapter taking hold of so many novels, and most young adult fiction, these days.
But, gosh, I would just like to read the story and learn something and meet some new people. Thinking about how everything works according to people who spend a lot of time thinking about how it works, can sometimes take the fun out of it. And it can change your memory of the way you experienced it if later you are told, no, that story is not amazingly narrated in the second-person, its unreliably first.
I am going to continue to think that I am a character in The Remains of the Day. That I am riding along with him on his trip, only talking to me in first-person when he has to catch me up here and there when we were off on our own or I was sleeping in my own quarters. Mr. Stevens asked me to recall the time before the war and how one could come to certain conclusions about what dignity is, or isn’t. You are not going to take that away from me with your functional semantics. Are you?
I understand we need to break it down before we can build it up, but sometimes the smell of organic (de)composition is overwhelming and I can’t enjoy the saga without a hanky to my nose. Build me a boardwalk of suspended disbelief to hold me above the weeds and swamp process below.
Still, it is good to have reliable people tell me a few ideas based on a whole lot of history, and I believe them. Especially when those people are writing a how-to in a novel way. The book How Fiction Works, by James Wood has been a true companion to my literary learning for the past decade. It has at least six college credits worth of information for someone lacking the finances or time.
I should stop reading books about how to write, because I am not a writer.