[continued from: Unreliable Narrators – Part One: Liars in Retrospect]
An example from literature this time:The first-person narrator in “Me and Kaminski” by Daniel Kehlmann. The “me” as it were. There’s a lot of reviews and interpretation around on this novel. A nice and short account of the story and of its place within Kehlmann’s oevre was published by Phillip Oltermann (In: The Observer,
For my present purpose I would have liked to focus on the first few pages of the novel, in which the reader realises that he is dealing with an unreliable narrator. Okay, I’ll admit that the title is already a bit of a hint in that direction. But the true character of the narrator unfolds over the course of a few paragraphs in which he describes and assesses what he does and says or how the people around him respond. It is his assessment of his (inter-)actions which reveals him as an unreliable narrator.
Unfortunately, I cannot find my copy of the novel and last read it a couple of years ago, so – unless I keep the whole analysis extremely vague and only dwell on the impressions I remember to have had at the time – I can’t really proceed with my argument right now. Therefore, I will stop here and revisit this article as soon as I have the book back. (It’s probably right in the middle of the shelf which is at eye-level, which is an extremely perfidious place to hide.)
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