Quoth William Ansley:
4 quoted lines
I have just finished listening to a series of taped lectures called
The Life and Writings of Geoffrey Chaucer_*. Somewhere in this series, the lecturer talks about how Chaucer inserts himself as a character, the narrator, in _The Canterbury Tales. He questions how much we should believe the narrator and says, "Chaucer may be the first unreliable narrator in English literature." This gave me quite a start.
Well, well. Wolfe has an even longer and more distinguished literary legacy than I realized.
It is important to distinguish between the unreliable narrator, a creature of the author, and the unreliable author. In Chaucer's case, the lecturer may well be correct. (It's been quite a while since I've read!) But the fascinating thing, for the few of us who have been following John Crowley's Aegypt series, is that the author, especially in -Daemonomania-, appears to be unreliable, in a third-person narration. Unreliable does not mean careless--I have been complaining about carelessness in RttW and I don't want the two confused--unreliability in a narrator or an author is deliberate. But different.
-alga