Unreliable Narration and Being a "Good" Reader

A View of Why I Need to Relax 

or Why Etsuko as a Narrator Has Lead Me to Question My Ability to Be a Good Reader

The aspect of the course that has stuck with me since one of our first lectures was the inability for us (as readers) to know if the unreliability of the narrators in the assigned novels was a product of careful intention of the character. For example in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the unreliability of the narration was most clearly a result of the way in which the narrative was framed. The qualities of a death sanctioned narrative that then undergoes a series of retellings from which the reader gets the interpretations of every layer of perspective from the speakers, in and of themselves create a sense of unreliability based on circumstance in which the story has been translated to the readers. In other texts however, the unreliability seems to be performed out of a more direct intention of the narrator. Etsuko exemplifies this type of unclear involvement in her position as narrator in A Pale View of Hills. The narration itself leaves clues to the state in which she is retelling her story. Was she driven mad (implications of the scene about her violin episode) and therefore should not be considered reliable? Does her daughter’s suicide and the resulting guilt color her narrative into being a constructed interpretation of her own failures as a mother in comparison to a “worse” mother she remembers from thirty years ago? Are Etsuko and Sachiko the same person and is Etsuko’s decision to tell Niki this story of her past through the potentially fictionalized Sachiko a way for her to negate the alienating effects of revealing her shameful past to her daughter (who seems to idolize her)? And finally what is the influence of the emergence of Hibakusha narratives on Etsuko’s narrative and Ishiguro’s authorial choices? It’s impossible to simply say that a narrator is unreliable and move on, the conditions in which a narrative is deemed unreliable and the implications of intent that the reader can assign to the narrator factor into any interpretation or critical analysis of the piece. What is most frustrating, especially in the case of Etsuko’s narration, is that there are so many possible ways of analyzing the reasoning behind her unreliability that there is no real way of settling my curiosity as a reader. Perhaps Etsuko is some combination of all these possible reasons behind her unreliability? Regardless of the fact that I could yammer on for much longer about my concerns and confusions about this text, I think maybe I need to accept the ambiguous nature of the ways in which interpretations can be drawn from this novel and just appreciate that I have developed the tools to think critically about the narration in these types of texts.