Unreliable narrator yet again.

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 178019

Carol earlier:
> 
> > Harry's parents supposedly dying in a car accident
> 
> 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. A narrator can be
ambiguous, he can leave important stuff out, but I can't think of any
third person narrator that is an outright liar, at least not in a book
that is better than a bucket of warm spit. An author can be tricky but
must play fair. Misdirection is great but you've got to be careful,
cross the line and have the third person narrator outright lie and
your book is crap.

Carol responds:
I never said that the narrator lies. He's "unreliable" to the extent
that he's reflecting the mistaken perceptions of the pov character.
An early example is the quickly corrected statement that Harry's
parents died in a car crash (reflecting Harry's belief). Changing "a
car crash" to "that car crash" makes no difference in the narrator's
reliability. He is still mistaken because Harry is mistaken.

Neither the narrator, who is just the voice telling the story, nor the
author is *lying.* We're just being misdirected by the mistaken
perceptions and biases of the character whose pov is reflected in the
narration. It's a sophisticated literary device used by many authors
other than JKR.

Other examples include the ironic opening statement of SS/PS (in the
spirit of Jane Austen) that the Dursleys were "proud to say that they
were perfectly normal, thank you very much." Granted, the narrator is
paraphrasing the Dursleys, but Vernon is the pov character and the
chapter reflects his views, not JKR's. "Mrs. Dursley had had a nice
normal day"--which consists of spying on the neighbors and Dudley's
new word, "Won't!" Normal day? Maybe in the Dursleys' view, but not in
JKR's, I hope. The narrator is reflecting the Dursleys' conception of
normality.

I could cite numerous examples of Harry's misperceptions of everything
from the scar tingling because Snape looked at him to the Thestrals
being "terrible," not to mention all those times that Harry is going
to die from being Crucio'd but doesn't. How many times does the
narrator tell us that Harry is going to die and he doesn't? How about
that last line of "The Forest Again": "He saw the mouth move and a
flash of green light, and everything was gone." End of chapter. Too
bad the picture of Harry without his glasses on the next page of the
American edition gives away that he isn't dead. But it sure sounds
like he is from the narrator's words.

I'll go back to one of the examples I gave in the previous post to
illustrate my point more clearly, an out-and-out false statement which
is not a lie but a misperception by the pov character, Harry,
reflected in the narrator's words:

"Snape was going to torture him to death or madness" (HBP Am. ed.
603). Even though we next hear Snape shouting "No!" and the pain
stops, the narrator never says that it's Snape who stops the Crucio
(and apparently Carrow who cast it). It's unclear whether Harry, who
still sees Snape as DD's murderer (for understandable reasons) ever
figures it out. Certainly, he hasn't done so in the next paragraph,
when he "staggered blindly toward Snape, the man he now hated as much
as he hated Voldemort himself" (603). On the tower, we're given
Snape's expression of "hatred and revulsion," his casting the spell,
and Harry's feeling of helpless horror (596)--"unreliable" not in the
depiction of the action--Snape does cast the spell--but in Harry's
interpretation of that action as treachery and murder. How many people
thought, from these two scenes that Snape was evil? The vast majority
of readers, probably (though not on this list, I admit). We're
supposed to either share Harry's view or at least feel our faith in
Snape's loyalty deeply shaken. And even I, a Snape supporter and
enthusiast, had my moment of doubt, feeling that I'd been misled into
believing that Snape was loyal to DD. 

You really can't tell for sure from reading HBP. You can only look for
clues to support either interpretation and wait for DH (which
continues to depict Snape as seemingly evil, with a few hints to the
contrary) until "The Prince's Tale" because that's how Harry, the pov
character, perceives him. I'll give just two here since most of the
other misdirection involves dialogue: "Had it worked, Harry wondered,
or had Snape already blasted the horror-figure aside as casually as he
had killed the real Dumbledore?" (171) and "Had [Dumbledore thought
that . . . he would live for years, for centuries, perhaps like his
frien Nicolas Flamel? If so, he had been wrong. snape had seen to
that. Snape, the sleeping snake, who had struck at the top of the
tower" (279). Sure, the narrator is paraphrasing Harry's thoughts, but
they're presented as if his perspective were accurate.

It isn't just Snape who's presented this way, but I'm most familiar
with the examples involving him. I've also listed examples of the
phrase "Harry knew" often but not always signalling a false
perception, but I don't feel like hunting up old posts now. I should
also note that all the references in GoF to Barty Crouch Jr. as
"Moody" are unreliable; Crouch isn't Moody and never was, any more
than "Bathilda" is Bathilda in that chapter of DH. Nevertheless, the
narrator calls the characters (Nagini being a character even though
she's not human) by those names because that's the "reality" that
Harry, the pov character, perceives.

I'm not saying that the narrator is *always* unreliable. If he were,
the story would be pointless. But he's unreliable on certain subjects,
those on which Harry (or another pov character) is mistaken or biased. 

Again, the unreliable narrator is a *concept*, one of several literary
devices that an author can use when he or she wants to misdirect the
reader. The narrator is not lying; he's expressing the truth as Harry
sees it or the "facts" as Harry knows them. But the misperceptions are
cleared away through the course of the book(s), sometimes immediately,
sometimes in the denouement of a particular book or the last book of
the series. *Perception* is the key. What we see or think we see is
not always what is happening, any more than the Muggles really saw
Sirius Black blow up the street. What we hear does not always mean
what we think it means, as Harry's many attempts at eavesdropping and
drawing conclusions from those conversations bear out. JKR very
skilfully misleads the reader along with Harry (unless, of course, the
reader is carefully watching for evidence to contradict Harry's
interpretation, reflected in the narrator's not always reliable
depiction of characters and events).

Carol, who considers JKR's skill in using the unreliable narrator as
one of her strengths, a way of skilfully tricking the reader without
actually "lying" about the characters and incidents