The Narrator

HARRUMPH. Just finished reading some Bret Easton Ellis stuff. You know what I'm tremendously sick off, in both published fiction and fanfiction? The unreliable narrator. It was cute, raging at Patrick Bateman stabbing a child in the neck then realising he may just be a bored businessman fantasising about his life, and various other things from The Vampire Lestat (where we found out Louis lied! He LIED, dammit!) to Chuck Palahniuk to the Ripley books*... but honestly, people. I've had enough of readjusting my perceptions of both narrator and the story now. Like most clever postmodern concepts, it seems to get old, quickly.

It's something I'll bear in mind for NaNoWriMo, and the direction in which I take my novel o'd00m, but for now? I'm going to read some Bronte and then Thomas Mann. They're annoyingly perfect and erudite, they're kind of stodgy, but I can fecking trust them and they'll help get me out of this reading antipathy.


*Yes, I'm aware that Ripley's status as a postmodern novel is open to debate seeing as a lot of academics argue that postmodernism began the second that bullet entered Kennedy's brain nearly ten years after it was published, but nobody can really agree on when the era of postmodernism began, so I'll keep it in for now.