The 'Seeming' Reality

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 155611

wynnleaf wrote:
> <snip> we're not necessarily being duped because we believe that
Harry's got it right. We're duped because we think the narrator has it
right.
>
Carol responds:
That's the point I was trying to make in my unreliable narrator post
upthread. The narrator establishes himself (or herself) as
unreliable almost from the first word of the books, when we're
informed that the Dursleys are "perfectly normal thank you very much."
That's the Dursleys' perspective, but it isn't the reader's, at least
not for very long.

And when we shift to Harry's pov, we get, via the third-person limited
omniscient narrator (again, the narrator "knows" what the pov
character "knows"), "He'd lived with the Dursleys ten years, ten
miserable years, as long as he could remember, ever since he'd been a
baby and his parents had died in that car crash" (SS Am. ed. 29). We
know that this information comes from Aunt Petunia, but we don't learn
that it's false until p. 53, by which time the reader has come to
trust the chatty, Harry-centered narrative and forgets that he's been
misinformed by anyone other than Aunt Petunia.

Then we get "It happened very suddenly. The hook-nosed teacher looked
past Quirrell's turban straight into Harry's eyes--and a sharp, hot
pain shot across the scar on Harry's forehead" (126). JKR uses the
narrator's seemingly straightforward description of Snape's action and
the nearly simultaneous pain in Harry's scar to imply that Snape's
gaze caused the scar to hurt, a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy on
the reader's part that Harry seems to share. Snape is being set up as
the villain. Of course, the "clue" is a red herring, but it's more
than that. It illustrates one of many types of misdirection from this
unreliable narrator. In this case and many others, Harry's perception
becomes our reality. Even at the end of SS/PS, when Snape is revealed
to have been trying to thwart the real villain, Quirrell, this first
scene has firmly established him in the minds of many readers as ESE.

The misleading narration extends to Quirrell as well: "Quirrell,
however, must have been braver than they thought. In the weeks that
followed, he did seem to be getting paler and thinner, but it didn't
look as though he'd cracked yet" (126). Quirrell, IOW, has not yet
knuckled under to Snape and revealed his supposed Anti-Dark arts spell
to help Snape get the Stone. Even anti-Snapers know on a second
reading of SS/PS that this statement, with its "must have been" and
"seem" and "look as though" is wide of the mark, but it illustrates
another narrative tactic--HRH's perspective revealed as apparently
false, not because they've misjudged Quirrell's loyalties but because
they've underestimated his courage! So we have Harry smiling at
Quirrell to encourage him to stand up to Snape. We also have
"important stuff hidden in the waffel"--Quirrell is getting thinner
and paler, but not for fear of Snape. His life force is being used up
by the parasite inside his turban.

I've used SS/PS because it establishes the technique, which is also
used, perhaps more subtly, in the later books. One more example, this
one from OoP: "Kreacher, it transpired, had been lurking in the attic"
(OoP Am. ed. 516). This straightforward statement from the narrator,
not presented as Harry's perspective but as a fact, is only partly
true. Yes, Kreacher was lurking in the attic, but that isn't where he
disappeared to when Sirius kicked him out. Like Snape and Dumbledore
when the need arises, the narrator is not telling the reader the full
truth here.

I'm sure that other posters can come up with other examples from
various books, but my point is that there's more at stake than "the
Harry filter" causing us to see Snape as evil because Harry does.

JKR is, as wynnleaf keeps saying, using the *narrator* to mislead the
reader. Sometimes it's just a means of obscuring the identity of the
villain in a particular book, but at other times it involves
straightforward statements, usually but not always representing
Harry's perspective, presented as fact.

Watch out for "knew" (how many times have we been told that Harry
"knew" he was going to die--or, worse, be expelled?), for "seems," for
"must have been." Watch out for partial explanations and unattributed
speeches. Watch out for parts of conversations that Harry doesn't
overhear and for interrupted speeches. Watch out for Harry's emotions
coloring what the narrator reports.

The unreliable narrator is not unique to JKR or Jane Austen. It's a
common literary device, and we need to be aware of its presence, and
of the specific forms of misdirection that JKR uses to maintain the
mystery, which has not yet been resolved in the half-book that is HBP.

Carol, who can provide other examples from other books, including HBP,
but wanted to use examples in which the narrator was clearly
unreliable, as opposed to illustrations from HBP in which that may or
may not be the case