<p>Mary, brilliant analysis.</p>
<p>I just a very long post, and I fear I’ll be too lazy to reconstruct it.</p>
<p>Instead, I’ll be brief.</p>
<p>I’ll piggyback on your remarks.</p>
<p>The idea of the unreliable narrator is a staple since Poe, brought to greatest fruition by the modernist British author, Ford Madox Ford, in his brilliant novel, THE GOOD SOLDIER.</p>
<p>However, postmodernism has taken these constructions a step further and asked if all narrative doesn’t have the same difficulty. The stories we narrative to ourselves that become our own lives have the same selectivity, distortion and confusion as a fictional narrative, and yet we base our lives on them.</p>
<p>But how can we now? We experience our lives sequentially and as a concatenation of narrated experience. The distortions born of all sorts of reasons, psychological pressure one of them, become imbedded like a fly in amber and become a staple of the story.</p>
<p>It reminds me of Woody Allen’s analysis of relationships in Annie Hall: They’re faulty and built of false premises but he can’t dispense with them because we need the eggs – a joke that makes sense in the context of the observation.</p>
<p>So, narrative is faulty, but how else can we make sense of the myriad, constant impression of life except by selectivity and tailoring events to fit our understanding of the story that has come before.</p>
<p>With this understanding is fiction different from memoir or do readings just have different expectations of the genres?</p>
<p>Because Michael is clearly telling the story we must expect all the distortions of narrative to be present for the narrator’s own psychological reasons and to keep the attention of his audience. You made this point, Mary.</p>
<p>Perhaps this warning comes as late as it does so the reader takes her own journey from the “childhood” of believing in the authenticity of the narrative to the “adulthood” of questioning narrative. So the journey becomes our journey.</p>
<p>Children understand reality even more selectively but more vividly, which perfectly mirrors the narrative style of the book.</p>
<p>Perhaps Michael has always remembered his journey as placid because the terrors it raised have been adequately resolved – his has become a man who is not haunted by events that, true, are anything but placid. But the opposite explanation could also be true, that these events, and being basically alone on ship and alone to create his own reality out of these events, was so frightening that only all these years later can they be really seen. Or maybe both are true at the same time, braiding a reality at once true and false, as all of ours are. Because aren’t we alone in a sea of impressions forced for weave our own cloth?</p>
<p>As for the very fascination discussion Mary provided us of Gaiman’s thoughts and the example if Dumbledore: I don’t buy it. For me, the character exists in the book(s) and nowhere else, whatever the author imagines. For me, Dumbledore is not gay, whatever Rowling says. I am not homophobic. I have no upset at the thought of a gay Dumbledore, but I am not going to believe he’s gay just because Rowling says he is. Dumbledore isn’t straight either. We just don’t know, and this part of his experience is not part of the tale.</p>
<p>The reader may know more of a character than the writer, too. Thus, the “reality” becomes a collage of writers’ intentions, character’ own willful ownership of their stories, and the readers’ impressions, and for each reader, the collage will differ.</p>
<p>Recent studies have shown that the brain processes fictional events we read in the same way as the “actual” events we live, and given this, is there a different between memoir and fiction?</p>