Paper Commentary

After much deliberation on what to do my paper on, Dr. Sexson pointed me to a direction that I had already been slightly following about the unreliable narrator. The term, being coined by Wayne C. Booth, has become a major tool in many novels and literary items. Nabokov has been able to take this literary tool and stretch it almost as far as it can go. Both of the major novels that we read in class deal with a story built strongly around the concept of the unreliable narrator. Both Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote have social issues that inhibit them from having a normal life. These men are able to construe facts and fabricate situations that leave the listener, or reader, siding with them. The idea of the unreliable narrator is important to me, because if it wasn’t for this class these novels would have gone unread by me for the main fact that I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend what was going on in the books. Being able to read between the lines and discover whether or not someone is telling the truth is a major step for a reader.
I’m not as happy with my paper as I could be. The topic of my paper could have gone on for hundreds of pages if in the right hands. Writing this paper did help me see a lot of the connections that I had missed the first time around, or just connections that I didn’t fully understand the first time around. Now that we have finished our discussions of these novels I find myself questioning all of the narrations I read, looking for the clues to their deception. I might say that these novels have ruined me from trusting a text and there isn’t the same thrill looking through a text that just has it all laid out for you. Where is the next Nabokov.