Unreliable Narrators

We all forget many of the specifics of lectures and discussions in school and college. But we also all experience educational moments that stand out and that we remember over the years. One of my such "aha" moments, one that has stuck with me these many years, occurred in a college class on the 19th Century British novel. We were discussing "Wuthering Heights," and the professor asked if we could always be sure the narrator of a novel was reliable, was telling the exact truth. I remember we all looked at him rather blankly, and finally he had to gently lead us to apprehend the idea that often authors would purposely create unreliable narrators whose viewpoints affected the way they told the story, even to the extent of -- consciously or unconsciously -- withholding or distorting the "truth." (Of course the question of whether there is any one "truth" is a huge one in academe, far too big to tackle here!) Our professor helped us see that Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who narrated much of the story in "Wuthering Heights," was limited in her knowledge, and also had an interest in presenting events a certain way. I remember this came to me as news; I guess I -- and apparently my classmates -- thought of the narrator as a sort of straightforward, unbiased conveyor of the events in a novel. Such a belief was obviously the product of youth and naivete. I thank my professor for that moment of being startled into questioning, of suddenly seeing literature in a new way.