Gene, meet Geoffrey. Oh, you already know each other.

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. William Ansley *These lectures were given by Professor Seth Lerer and published by The Teaching Company <http://www.teachco.com/>. I thought they were quite good, but I had a humanities deprived education. I don't know how much they would have to offer to someone who had already taken a course on Chaucer.