N for narration !!!

Narrative is a funny thing. Especially first-person narrative. On the one hand, we can never really trust the first-person narrator to give us the whole story. He or she never reveals everything - there are, necessarily, blind spots. Things the narrator chooses not to mention, things the narrator doesn't see because of his/her subject-position. But the only way that first-person narration can really work is if we "trust" the narrator in spite of our best instincts. I mean, sure, the narrator might be crazy or clearly presenting facts in such a way that he/she is someone with whom we have sympathy. If we really don't "trust" the narrator, at least on some level, it's really difficult to get it up to continue reading. Even if we believe that the narrator is unreliable, we've got to be on board with that unreliability, to see it as something worth thinking about.

Now, in the conventional realist novel with first-person narration, we get one viewpoint, and any resisting reading that we perform means that we interrogate that one perspective that we have in front of us, a perspective that by its very design inspires identification on the part of the reader. But after realism, first-person narration goes a bit wacky. What we get instead, most often, is a collection of first-person perspectives out of which we as readers must then attempt to make some kind of sense. In performing that operation, we arrive at a version of something that we might call "the truth." But, of course, that "truth" is also subjective, right? We, in our reading, ultimately "write" a version of "truth" that depends not only on the subjective narratives that we evaluate but on our own subjective experiences. So if you give a group of people a collection of narratives to evaluate, each person will likely come up with a different "truth."

Of course, depending on the choices of the author, and the number of narratives with which the author provides readers, the author can to some extent attempt to control reader response, but such attempts at control can never be perfect. No author can anticipate every possible interpretation, try as any author might. Something is always going to slip through the cracks


And then there's the self-presentation issue, and blogging is part of that. I'm the "author" of this blog. One might regard each post as its own distinct text. As you read each post, you come up with a composite "truth" . Is it possible to get to the "truth" of a person in discourse, to come up with a whole truth? Probably not, right? And then the other side of that coin becomes this: is it ever possible to be honest - to tell the truth? One can try, sure, but ultimately any such thing is contingent upon a variety of factors, right? But so then one can make an effort to be consistent across texts, but in spite of my best efforts, I think I'm not. . And so then I wonder whether narrative consistency - in any context - is possible, or even if possible, if it's desirable. I mean, I think that I've always assumed that it is desirable - necessary even - but it's something that I can't seem to maintain. So if I can't maintain it, then is it desirable or necessary? To what extent is consistency in narrative false?