This last example from William Faulkner fits all three categories of monkeying about I proposed earlier - with time, perspective, and a combination of time and perspective. While the stream of consciousness takes care of time, the dislocation of perspective comes with the use of multiple narrators. Faulkner confines himself to four in this instance, but liked the technique so much, his follow-up, ‘As I Lay Dying’ has no fewer than seventeen separate witnesses to the story. But the habit of using multiple narrators wasn’t unique to Modernist writers; one of the pioneers of the novel in the 1740’s, Samuel Richardson, generated additional perspectives by having his characters write letters to one another - the so-called “epistolary novel”, of which perhaps the best known is his mammoth work, ‘Clarissa’ (1747-8), which has four central correspondents; Clarissa Harlowe, her best friend Anna Howe, Robert Lovelace and his fellow adventurer John Belford. Given the sheer volume of missives that wing their way back and forth among these four, it’s surprising they had time to rise from their escritoires and do anything worth writing about. But while it’s true that action isn’t the narrative’s strong point (because it’s all, necessarily, related at second-hand), the sophisticated psychological detail that emerges from the letters as each character analyses his or her immediate past instantly carried the fledgling genre of the novel into new and unexplored territory - Tolstoy couldn’t have complained there’s no analysis of motivation in this book. By structuring the novel in this way, Richardson allows the reader to build a composite picture of what’s going on between Clarissa and Lovelace, giving us additional perspectives a single omniscient narrator wouldn’t be able to - short of contradicting himself, or sounding like a second-rate agony aunt. And so the character of Clarissa herself turns out to be rather more involved than the goody two-shoes persona her letters would have us believe - as is the rakish Lovelace, who isn’t quite the two-dimensional sexual predator he’s often painted. For example, as Clarissa’s death approaches, she makes an astounding admission (“I could have loved him”), despite the fact that Lovelace has drugged and raped her. This opens up a huge can of psychological worms for both characters, and tempts us into a more sophisticated interpretation than the “Clarissa good, Lovelace bad” polarity we seem to be steered towards elsewhere in the book (and by certain species of literary criticism). It was this psychological depth that persuaded Doctor Johnson (a man not given to gush) that “There is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all ‘Tom Jones’”. Which may or may not be true, but it’s easy to see why the good Doctor thought that: Richardson used the confessional style to delve into the darker recesses of human psychology, and then gave his findings additional perspective by having his characters comment on them from different points of view. So an entirely personal and subjective viewpoint moves in the direction of objectivity, a) by being written down and b) by being read and commented on by a second party. Multiple narration grew considerably more sophisticated in the twentieth century as writers experimented with different ways of representing reality; for example, in his novel ‘The Death of Artemio Cruz’, Carlos Fuentes achieves the seemingly impossible by creating a three-tier narration using only one character. Artemio Cruz is dying. As he lies in bed, he thinks about his current situation - using the pronoun “I” when referring to himself. When things are quiet, he ponders his adult career - and since he is not exactly proud of everything he’s done, he uses the pronoun "You" to talk about such incidents he’d really rather live down. Then in moments of reverie, he thinks back to his life as a very young man, romantic and full of hope: this part is narrated using the third person, "he." So different pronouns are used to indicate distance from the narrator’s source material. Then there’s Milan Kundera. His novel ‘The Joke’ has four story-tellers, Ludvik, Helena, Kostka and Jaroslav, whose narratives weave in and out of one another as their lives intertwine and then diverge. As the stories both complement and contradict one other, it becomes the reader’s job to extrapolate the “real” version that lies somewhere in amongst the confusion. The first section consists of a conventional first-person narration by Ludvik - a measured thoughtful, self-critical performance. Part 2 represents an abrupt gear change when Helena Zemanek takes over, whose style is nothing more than a species of verbal flatulence. And so the novel progresses through its first six sections, by which time the reader’s familiar with which style belongs to which narrator. In amongst all these conflicting testimonies there’s Lucie, who’s never given a direct voice in the book, so who only exists as a compilation of impressions from the four narrators. By having all her thoughts and actions interpreted for her, Kundera drives home one of the book’s main points: that we can only picture other people filtered through our own consciousnesses. No one has an objective existence independent of the personal visions we create of them. Everyone is a compilation of everyone else’s perceptions. Then, in Part 7, Kundera starts to pass the baton from one narrator to another more rapidly in what resembles the technique of ‘jump-cuts’ borrowed from cinema editing. As the pace quickens, so the fragmented nature of perceived reality is further accented. No longer are long-past events merely recounted - we’re brought up-to-date, with things happening in the here and now. All the main characters are finally in the same place at the same time, and the climax approaches. Which I won’t spoil for you. So in Kundera’s take on multiple narration, the act of reading is necessary for the story’s full meaning to be completed - the reader becomes an artistic collaborator. Kundera’s style closely resembles that of another fictional strategy - The Unreliable Narrator, who doesn’t just present us with an incomplete or skewed vision of events, he actually distorts them, whether the realizes he’s doing this or not. Now to a certain extent, all narrators are unreliable in that, being human, they’re necessarily partial, or just plain wrong in the way they interpret events going on around them. But some are more fallible than others. I suspect the use of the Unreliable Narrator may have grown out of a feeling that certain fictional characters seem blessed with a memory so incredibly accurate it doesn’t quite ring true. Take Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example; forty years or so on from his shipwreck, he’s still able to remember that he was washed ashore with only three hats, one cap and two unmatched shoes for company. Now I know he had plenty of leisure in which to memorize these objects, but you’ve got to admit his total recall is astounding. As is that of Jane Eyre, who remembers, seemingly word-for-word, many long conversations she shared with Mr Rochester. As readers, though, we tend not to notice this, because it would ruin our enjoyment of the story if we made a big thing of it. So we suspend our disbelief. But with certain examples of Unreliable Narrator, they can’t even believe their own testimony. In Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘The Blind Assassin’, the character of Iris Griffen who’s in her 80’s isn’t able to verify what she’s telling us - “. . . but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?,” she asks at one point in the narrative. She doesn’t know, and therefore nor can we. Sometimes, she loses the thread of her story, and admits her fallibility; “I’ve looked back over what I’ve set down so far, and it seems inadequate,” she writes. Yet, ironically, Iris’s self-doubt, which multiplies possible meanings, makes her testimony that much more credible because I imagine we’ve all felt the same way in our own lives, particularly those of us who don’t write diaries or keep journals. I think this is because if we don’t know for certain that something’s accurate, we, as readers, undertake our own plausibility checks if we’ve been alerted to the possibility that something’s not quite on the level. Once again, we’re made to earn our meaning, which somehow makes it mean more than if we’d had it spoon-fed to us by an omniscient narrator. Not only do we appreciate Iris’s disarming honesty, we perhaps feel grateful for what she has managed to rescue from oblivion, and therefore set greater store by it. But it was Agatha Christie who furnished literature with the most notorious example of the Unreliable Narrator in ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, published in 1926. (If you don’t want to know whodunnit skip the next paragraph). Christie isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath as the Modernists, but not only was she writing at exactly the same period, she was exploring narrative dislocation in a far more accessible way than Tom, Ezra and the rest of the gang. When it finally becomes clear that Doctor James Sheppard is not merely the narrator but the murderer, Christie was deluged with complaints that she was being somehow unfair to her readers. It simply wasn’t cricket. She was, it’s true, defying the conventions not just of detective fiction, but the novel as a genre; a narrator tends to orchestrate meaning, to act as a guide, even as a friend or accomplice for the reader, helping him to understand and interpret what’s going on. Not so James Forrest, who’s busy covering his tracks from page one onwards. And when you eventually discover hedunnit, it’s true there is a certain feeling of betrayal, highlighted no doubt by the fact that you failed to spot it all along (I’m assuming, perhaps wrongly, that like me you’re not sufficiently devious to solve the mystery without the benefit of Poirot’s “I put it to you” summaries). The criticism didn’t seem to bother Christie, however; she continued to break down the conventions of the genre, culminating in her greatest fictional coup in her 1934 novel ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, in which Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells reveal that everyonedunnit - maybe. These are just a few examples of the ways writers monkey around with narrative expectations, either to deliberately frustrate the reader, or to make a broader philosophical point that life isn’t as simple as we might like to think. Or perhaps that we are each at least in part responsible for making sense of our lives. But whether it’s the interior monologue, multiple viewpoint or the unreliable narrator, they all acknowledge to a greater or lesser degree that structure can be placed upon the available source material, however contingent that structure may be. Unlike this next lot . . .