It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.
Just to show you how little reliance can be placed even on what are supposed the best accounts of a battle, I mention that there are some circumstances mentioned in General -'s account which did not occur as he relates them. It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took place, or in what order.
Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.
All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon
In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.
It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.
Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.
Ezra clapped his hands. "all right," he said. "In addition to the books we're reading as a class, I want to do an extra side project on unreliable narrators." Devon Arliss raised her hand. "what does that mean?" Ezra strode around the room. "well, the narrator tells us the story in the book, right? But what if... the narrator isn't telling us the truth? Maybe he's telling us his skewed version of the story to get you on his side. Or to scare you. Or maybe he's crazy!
I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.
I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
There's something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.
We are unreliable narrators - all of us.
When the narrator says, 'This is a story without surprises,' most of the time, this is not what happens.
there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.
Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad.
