Caitlin Carmichael

Abby: Unreliable Narrator!... Unreliable Narrators are considered a device, right? Don't answer. They are. They are and they don't get a lot of literary analysis because it's a gimmick. It's a trick. I mean Canterbury Tales gets a shoutout because, you know, it's good but typically it's used for popcorn crime novels and thriller movies Agatha Christie, Usual Suspects, so on and so forth. But I'm going to argue that every narrator by its very definition is unreliable because when you tell a story there's always an essential distance between the story itself and the telling of said story, right? So therefore every story that has ever been told has an Unreliable Narrator. The only truly reliable narrator would be someone hypothetically telling a story that unfolds before our very eyes which is obviously very impossible SO what does that tell us? That the only truly reliable narrator is life itself. But life itself is also completely unreliable because it is constantly misdirecting and misleading us and taking us on this journey where it is literally impossible to predict where it is going to go next... Life as the ultimate Unreliable Narrator.

Elena Dempsey-González: When critics reviewed Abby Dempsey's favorite album, Bob Dylan's 1997 release, "Time Out of Mind," the song "Make You Feel My Love" was a source of much criticism. Every track on the album brimmed with unrelenting melancholy and sadness. But there, smack in the middle of it all, sat an unbashedly populist hit song, a love song... a song that in years to come would be covered by Garth Brooks, of all people. Critics argued that putting an on-the-nose love song in the middle of an album about despair and tragedy was Dylan's only misstep. Others argued that was his point.