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Young Dylan: I crave a happy life, grandpa. I have a almost desperate craving for stability and happiness, the way fat people crave chocolate or lost hikers crave rescue. I want to live a big, great, fantastical life, but I am concerned that the tragedy that seems to follow me, the tragedy that birthed me will prevent that from ever happening.
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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.
Gabby Bryan
Extended Reading
