For a long time, I kept trying to explain to N. why a first-person narrator is unreliable. (If you don’t want to be lectured at all the time, don’t marry an educator. Otherwise, get prepared to being educated in perpetuity.) “But if the narrator is telling his or her own story, they have to know what they are talking about, right?” N. kept saying. “I don’t understand why I should doubt what a first-person narrator tells me.”
Then, we traveled to San Francisco for a conference. Before we set out, N. donned a huge and heavy coat that I’d never seen him wear before.
“We are traveling to California,” I said. “Why the hardcore coat?”
“You know this book series that I love that is set in San Francisco?” he answered. “The main character always complains about how it’s extremely cold there. It’s always foggy and there is this piercing wind. I need to be prepared for that.”
Of course, when we arrived in San Francisco, the weather was lovely. It was warm and sunny. I walked around in my business suit while N. suffered in his coat meant to withstand Siberian winters.
After a day of sweating in the coat, he finally exclaimed,
“Oh, now I get it!” N. suddenly exclaimed. “You should never trust the first-person narrator because he doesn’t talk about how things really are. He just relates his own subjective perception of reality that might be very different from mine.”
And then there are people who say that literary criticism is useless.
Clarissa's Blog 
One thing that has always puzzled me is the scandal that often falls upon writers that supposedly write autobiographical accounts when it’s discovered that pieces of it are not true. Even if it’s supposedly based on a true story, it;s still fiction. I’m thinking about James Frey, for example.
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I was just thinking about Frey, too! It’s the same with reality TV when people are extremely disappointed to find out that the Bachelor is not about to marry the woman he chose.
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Frey was accused of passing off fiction as autobiography, while Wolfe did just the opposite…
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You were lucky. San Francisco *is* cold and foggy most of the time.
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Both times I went, the weather was fantastic. Maybe it’s me, or something. 🙂
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Seconding what Stringer Bell said. It’s weird weather — summers can be really cold.
Didn’t Mark Twain say “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”? I lived in SF for a year, and December was marginally *warmer* than July.
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We might have a different understanding of “really cold.” For me, it’s -50C. (-58F).
Oh, I’d love to see a good snowstorm right now.
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Yes, Twain said that, and that is how it is. Summers aren’t summery and that is why they seem even cooler than they are.
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I’ve been there dozens of times and never found a sliver of sunshine. I still like the city, though, despite the awful weather.
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Oh, I love the city. I wouldn’t like to live there, though. The only climate I would enjoy is subarctic.
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Talking about unreliable first person narrator, what do you think of Fernando Vallejo’s “La virgen de los sicarios”? I just mentioned it in a post, so I thought about your own post.
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If you’re talking about that MLA recently where it was so sunny and nice, that was unusual for the time of year, truly.
The problem people usually have traveling to California is that they think it is Florida or Puerto Rico. So they arrive in shorts, sandals, and little shirts, unaware that nights are cool even when days are warm, or that SF is often 10 degrees C and clammy at noon. Even I, traveling from Louisiana in summer and being from SF, tend to forget and to bring only a light jacket when what I need is a sweater. (Summers are cold and it doesn’t really get warm until September.)
So I am pleased that N. erred in a more unusual direction than many.
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Could the present post have been inspired by this WSJ article?
I read somewhere that one standby of American novelists for a couple of generations (and to some extent still) is the work product of a New Deal program called the Federal Writers Project; said to be a treasure trove of local knowledge and assorted Americana.
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I haven’t read the article, or I would have linked to it. I’m actually writing a post about how it’s important to link to things that inspire you right now.
Thanks for the link!
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