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we are taking instructions from this unreliable narrator, whether he’s a clown or a madman or a bragger or a naif or just an ordinary liar.
Clem Samson • The Seven Labyrinths: Walking the post ego path
Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” to illustrate the unreliable narrator
D. T. Max • Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
I am more attentive now to the way a person emerges from the words she speaks, how people think of each other as fictions, how stories change the way we think of people we love, how our deceptive memories shape our lives.
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.
Julian Barnes • The Sense of an Ending
was better to hear the unhappy details of such a life from the lips of the man who had led it rather than from someone else. Mothers often portrayed fathers in too flattering a light. Obituaries rarely told the whole story, especially when their subjects led classified lives.
Daniel Silva • The Black Widow
All of this research shows that we are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of
... See moreJonathan Gottschall • The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
the voice on the other end of the line wasn’t my father at all, but was the voice of a narrator. He was calm, assured, and from another era…probably the fifties or sixties. This was a voice from nature documentaries or educational films made by Disney, and he wasn’t addressing me directly but was speaking to Donald Duck.