umm, who's Nelly Dean?

who's Nelly Dean?

The housekeeper in Wuthering Heights who tells a great deal of Cathy's story to the narrator (whose name I suddenly can't remember).

OK. I skimmed a lot of Wuthering Heights because I couldn't reach half of the cast and give them the smacks they needed.

But, yeah, I didn't trust her from word one.

Lockwood is the narrator. I always felt Withering heights would be a good story, but seeing it through Lockwood/Nelly Dean drove me fucking nuts. As did the stableman's accent.

And that's exactly what I loved about Wuthering Heights ! I heart unreliable narrators.

The big example of an unreliable narrator I can think of is the narrator of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier John Dowell. As for unpleasant characters, I had a serious issue with Edward Ashburnham in that book, and thought that Leonora had a good reason for taunting him for his unfaithfulness.

When I made that argument in my modern lit class, a classmate and I spent most of that class arguing back and forth on Edward's "goodness" and Leonora's striking back. The prof loved it that we got so into our respective opinions.

Strega recommended that book, and I really enjoyed it.

A steady diet of unreliable narrators can be exhausting-- well, a steady diet of anything can be exhausting, come to think of it. Anyhow, reason I brought it up is because in the current MS, a friend who read it, was concerned that my lead character/narrator did something early on in the book that really startled the hell out of her. And she worried that it would render the character unsympathetic and keep a reader from sticking with the story (also make it potentially unmarketable, which would keep an editor from wanting to take a chance on it). Frankly, I was surprised by her reaction-- I didn't think that what the character did was all that shocking by a lot of lit standards. It's just the way things are. Overall, my argument is if the story and the character are compelling enough, the reader will be patient enough to allow the story to unfold-- to see what would drive the character to behave in such a way.

I realized then, that even though my friend is incredibly well-read, across the literary spectrum, she's been writing romance for several years now and is maybe looking at this through the scrim of the genre rules that tend to govern romance. People reading romance don't want their characters doing disagreeable things-- it renders them unsympathetic. And while my friend realizes that what I'm writing isn't a romance, in any way, shape, or form, I think she's so mired in those kinds of reader reactions, she's sort of lost perspective.

Which is why I came to the buffistas.

How do you differentiate an unreliable narrator from one who's narrating from their own viewpoint? People see things differently - ever read Nabokov's White Fire? I read it for a course in college and I think that was the first time I came across something where you can see how a narrator is obviously interpreting things in how own, very special way. (For those who haven't read the book, it's a long poem with loooong involved footnotes.)

The narrator, unless he's omniscient, is going to have his own take on things. I can deal with misunderstanding, but my interpretation of the unreliable narrator is that the narrator is intentionally misleading the reader for whatever reason. That's the part I don't get into.