From: <akt@attglobal.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n088
Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 19:36:43 

Quoth William Ansley:

> 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.

It is important to distinguish between the unreliable narrator, a
creature of the author, and the unreliable author.  In Chaucer's case,
the lecturer may well be correct. (It's been quite a while since I've
read!) But the fascinating thing, for the few of us who have been
following John Crowley's Aegypt series, is that the *author*, especially
in -Daemonomania-, appears to be unreliable, in a *third-person*
narration. Unreliable does not mean careless--I have been complaining
about carelessness in RttW and I don't want the two
confused--unreliability in a narrator or an author is deliberate. But
different.

-alga


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/