Unreliable narrator yet again.

[Geoff Bannister]

No: HPFGUIDX 177991

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Zara" <zgirnius at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> > Eggplant:
> > If the narrator had said Harry's parents died in a car crash that
> > would indeed be an unreliable narrator, but a narrator saying that 
> is
> > what Harry was told is not a unreliable narrator. 
> 
> zgirnius:
> Thus spake the narrator:
> 
> PS/SS:
> He'd lived with the Dursleys almost 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. 
> 
> zgirnius:
> We could, arguably, conclude that the narrator is telling us here 
> what Harry is thinking. But the narrator does not actually tell us 
> that is what s/he is doing.
> 
> Though really, I find this to be splitting hairs. Is the 
> narration "unreliable" or merely "misleading"? I think there are 
> times when the narrator fails to specify that we are being told 
> Harry's thoughts and opinions rather than Potterverse reality, and 
> many times when we are shown things and told Harry's reactions in 
> such a way that we are led to conclude that Harry's reactions must be 
> correct because they so beautifully mesh with what he and we have 
> seen.

Geoff:
Yes, but isn't real life like this?

I can recall as a child being told certain facts by my parents and would 
say "Well, I have an uncle who did this or that..." not  "I have BEEN TOLD 
that I had an uncle who did this or that" and then found out later that 
this information wasn't right. Not that I was deliberately told lies but 
that I had perhaps got hold of the wrong end of the stick when first 
hearing about it.

I can recall even fairly recently talknig to a relative of my father's whom 
I had never met before who, after I had made a comment, said "No, no, 
I think your Dad got it wtong. What really happened was this..."

Like Harry. I had accepted that as the correct version up to that point. 
In the quote from PS, we are seeing Harry's actual point of view, because 
he had been told the wrong facts by Petunia and he had no benchmark 
with which to compare it; hence, to him, it was a given.