1. Much like in our day to day lives where we regard some of our friends as more reliable narrators of their stories than others, the same is true when reading fiction. We are always experiencing the stories we read from a particular point of view and as we learn more about the narrator and as we assess to what degree the narrator's perspective is congruent (or incongruent) with the story's action and what characters reveal themselves to be, we discover the narrator's degree of reliability.
In other words, narrators in fiction are rarely objective or disinterested. Much more often than not, narrators have some investment, some stake, in relaying events to us readers in the way they want us to experience and understand them. They help form our perceptions. They help form how we experience characters in the story and guide what we think and feel about the story's landscape (or cityscape), atmosphere, tone, and other elements of the story.
In The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins tells the novel's story from multiple points of view, using multiple narrators. I am about 200 pages in (a third of the way) and I've been under the care of three separate narrators so far with more to come. Inevitably, the result is instability. It's difficult to know how reliable each of these narrators is and it's adding much intrigue and mystery to a story built on intrigue and mystery just by virtue of the, well, mysterious and intriguing things that happen in the novel.
2. Today marked the 50th anniversary of Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher, Dock Ellis, throwing a no-hitter while tripping on LSD against the Padres in San Diego. This anniversary reminded of a perfect day I experienced on September 18, 2014. I took the Metro from Huntington Station in Virginia to the D. C. neighborhood of Foggy Bottom, took a photo stroll, and then popped into the West End Cinema and watched a superb documentary film about Dock Ellis, No-No, A Dockumentary. It's available on It tells the compelling story of Dock Ellis in a way that travels far beyond the most unusual no-hitter he pitched fifty years ago. I thought about commemorating the anniversary of his no-hitter today by watching the movie on Amazon Prime, but, to be honest, I couldn't put down The Woman in White.
3. I put a layer of the refried beans I made on Thursday, brown rice, and shredded cheese on a warmed tortilla and laid a fried egg on top. I rolled it up and, not only was this a breakfast that left me satisfied for much of the day, it furthered this trip I've been on over the last couple of days, reliving my grad school days in my tiny basement apartment with its wee kitchen where I significantly broadened and deepened my love of cooking.
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