The Too Unreliable Narrator (was: What really happened on the tower)

[Neri]

No: HPFGUIDX 156085

> Pippin: 
> Voldemort appearing, time-travel and the priori
> incantatem weren't twists in the sense that they took the story in 
an 
> unexpected direction.

Neri:
The time-turner didn't take the story in an unexpected direction??? 
That's an interesting opinion. I suspect that some readers might 
disagree with you on that. 


> Pippin:
> Voldemort bursting out of Quirrell's head
> was startling (and also a non-description, since the "bursting" 
isn't
> revealed until OOP) but we already expected that Harry would
> confront Voldemort. To me there's a difference between, 'We're
> expecting Voldemort and Yipes! there he is' and 'We're expecting
> Snape and Yipes! it's Quirrell.' 
> 
> The time-turner doesn't change the direction of the story --
> Harry still has to save Sirius-- it just gives him a chance to do 
it.
> Buckbeak's survival is a twist -- but by then  the time turner has
> been explained. 
> 
> The fact that wands store images of prior spells was revealed when
> Harry's wand disgorged the ghostly Dark Mark. The appearance of
> Voldemort's victims was a surprise but didn't change the direction
> of the story. Harry still had avoid being killed and escape from 
the 
> graveyard.
> 

Neri:
I think you have a vague and rather limiting definition of a plot 
twist. The time-turner wasn't but Buckbeak's survival was? Hmmm. I 
think our whole Unreliable Narrator discussion centers around its use 
for tricking or fooling the reader, especially if some sneaky clues 
were supplied before. We had classic sneaky clues for Voldy hiding 
underneath Quirrell's turban (including Quirrell adjusting the turban 
when he goes out of the empty class where Harry thinks he was talking 
to Snape!) and classic sneaky clues about Hermione time traveling, 
and its obvious that both these events were designed to catch us by 
surprise. Taking cases like this altogether out of the discussion 
would make it very limited.


> Pippin:
> Dobby was accused of lying and did in fact  equivocate about whether
> Voldemort was involved. He was never accused of opening the chamber.
> 

Neri:
He was not accused of opening the chamber himself because he 
obviously wasn't the Heir of Slytherin, but he was certainly accused 
of doing what the Malfoys (which were suspects) sent him to do, and 
nobody vouched for him that he didn't. 


> > Neri:
> > Who challenged Ginny in CoS?
> 
> Pippin:
> Harry himself, on the morning of the day she was taken. He asked her
> if she knew anything about opening the chamber.
> 

Neri:
That was awfully late in the game, and besides "asking her if she 
knew something" is a not exactly "challenging". BTW, McGonagall 
telling Crouch!Moody that transfiguration isn't used as punishment at 
Hogwarts isn't much of a challenge either. So your standard of 
challenging is quite permissive. By this standard it would be 
difficult to find a character who was *not* challenged. 

> 
> > 
> > > Pippin:
> > > No character (including the narrator) has been revealed to have 
> > deceived  the hero or the reader in a plot twist who had not 
previously 
> > appeared to be unreliable.
> > > 
> 
> Pippin:
> Okay, this was muddy. (I blame the heat.) Let me try again.
> 
> Characters that Harry gets wrong always seem to have a bit of
> fishy business in the background that's never explained until the
> twist.  Of course  the face value characters can
> act fishy too, but when they're hiding something important, we
> always know. 
> 
>  We know that Hermione is keeping a secret about how she's getting
> to all those classes, and we know that Ron is probably
> practicing Quidditch on the sly. OTOH, we never got a chance to 
guess  
> that Ginny was practicing Quidditch, but we did learn that she can 
be 
> sneaky because she pretended  she never knew the diary was 
dangerous.
> 

Neri:
OK, so going by this *any* character, not precluding Ron, Hermione 
and Ginny, might turn out to be ESE in Book 7. So the only "rule" I 
see here is "anything goes". Also, here you seem to change your mind 
here and agree that Hermione keeping the time-turner secret *was* 
part of a plot twist.
 

> Pippin:
> Other examples:
> Quirrell tells an unconvincing story about his turban. 
> Scabbers inexplicably falls asleep after the fight with Goyle.
> Fake!Moody says Crouch disappeared from the map. 
> Kreacher tells an unconvincing story about where he was over 
Christmas.
> 

Neri:
Again, your standard for "a bit of fishy business in the background" 
is very inclusive. So in fact no character is free from suspicion, 
and therefore there are no rules and in practice the JKR can do 
anything.


> Pippin:	
> The narrator pulls a similar trick, telling us that Harry's parents 
died
> in a car crash. It's fishy because we already know that they seem
> to have been killed in a place called Godric's Hollow by someone 
> called Voldemort. Sure enough, it turns out we can't take the 
> narrator at face value either. The narration shuttles seamlessly
> between one character's seeming reality and another's, and does
> not always let us know when a character's seeming reality has
> strayed from the objective reality of the books. However, by using
> the other rules to look for hints,  IMO we can try to guess when it 
has
> done so.

> Geoff:
> I'm not quite sure this "similar trick" is the same. It may be 
fishy because /we/ already 
> know about Godric's Hollow but this is not an unconvincing story 
from Harry's perspective. 
> 
> 'The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very 
thin scar on his forehead 
> which was shaped like a bolt of lightning. He had had it as long as 
he could remember and 
> the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia 
was how he had got it.
> 
> "In the car crash when your parents died," she had said. "And don't 
ask questions."'
> (PS "The Vanishing Glass" p.20 UK edition)

Neri:
I think Pippin might be meaning the last section of this chapter when 
Harry's parents dying in accident is brought up as if by the 
narrator. However, immediately before and after that we are told that 
Harry is thinking these things. And by that point we already know he 
got this information from Petunia and that his parents didn't die in 
a car accident. Therefore I don't think there's anything fishy here 
at all. It's obvious to the reader that the narrator is only 
representing Harry's beliefs and that Harry was deceived. This is an 
example of unreliable narrator but it *isn't* an example of JKR using 
the unreliable narrator to fool the reader.


> Carol responds:
> First, a technicality: a third-person narrator (unlike a first-
person
> narrator) is not a character, only the voice or persona that tells 
the
> story, in this case usually but not always from Harry's pov. 
> 
> Second, and more important, the narrator does not deceive the hero.
> The hero has no clue that he's in a story and has no way of knowing
> what the narrator says about him. The narrator doesn't impose
> limitations upon himself or herself. The limitations are imposed by
> the author, who decides whether to use a third-person limited 
narrator
> (limited to a particular character's pov), a third-person dramatic
> narrator (who sees the characters from the outside), or what amounts
> to a first-person narrator (detailed exposition delivered by one
> character to another, notably Crouch!Moody in GoF or Dumbledore's
> expository near-monologues in most of the other books).

Neri:
I acknowledge the distinction between the author and the narrator. I 
was aware of it all the time but didn't want to complicate this 
discussion even further.


> Carol: 
> <snip>
> In a few instances, we have the narrator rather sneakily
> hiding from the reader things that Harry knows perfectly well, for
> example that Harry isn't giving Ron Felix Felicis.

Neri:
No, we don't have *few* instances. That was my whole point in this 
thread. We have exactly *one* known case throughout the whole series 
where the author fools the reader by hiding from him things that 
Harry knows perfectly well (BTW, weren't you mixing author and 
narrator yourself here?). We also have exactly *one* case throughout 
the whole series in which it is Harry himself who fools the reader. 
Very interestingly these cases turn out to be the same – the Felix 
Felicis incident. I don't think this is any coincidence.  


> Carol:
> But in *no instance* does the narrator withhold information from
> *Harry.*  
<snip>
> The narrator sometimes knows things that Harry doesn't know

Neri:
I'm afraid that after the above two statements I'm more mixed than 
ever <g>.

OK, regardless of any technical issues, I think you and Pippin still 
manage to avoid the main point of my thread. The Author obviously 
can't allow the narrator to be *too* unreliable, because in that case 
the reader simply would never believe a word the narrator is saying. 
My question is: What is JKR's personal limit in using the 
unreliability of her narrator to fool the readers? I'm interested in 
definitions of this limit backed up by examples in the book (examples 
in which we already know whether we were fooled or not, not 
hypotheticals like the PT case). Pippin came up with a list of rules, 
but I think that they basically boil down to "wherever the author 
raises some doubt – anything goes", and since JKR almost always 
raises *some* doubt, in practice it's "anything goes". So where is 
the limit between tricking and conning? What *wouldn't* JKR do to 
fool the reader?


Neri