Strange case of Dr Funky and Mr Narrator

Earlier I described a posting strategy which I'll now call KISS DDOS that, in short, involves creating a critical mass of bad posts whose ensuing explosion should hopefully propel the writer's skull out of their local instance of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and into the light of synergistic sociality. In my world of today this translates into listing a bunch of books, loosely associated by my vast ignorance of other books, and leaving further study of the suggested shared theme as an exercise to the reader (future me).

The subject is not the unreliable narrator, as the title may trick one into assuming, but rather the good old technique of using multiple narrators, sometimes organized as a meta-hierarchy of trust fiat laundering, for the purpose of hypnotizing a self-repressed audience into listening and actively imagining a succulent story of wild fantasy, the condensed energy of which may later radiate and sublimate some deeply tangled inner truths.

Contrast this with "3rd person limited," a method developed by the victorious middle class of the late XIX century, the so-called "realists," a current that still claims many victims within the world of gaming. Realism, whose sole purpose is to leave a detailed memento concerning just how much the life of its authors sucked, is founded on the pretense that there is no narrator, no author even, just plain facts reported by an impartial agency (3rd person) that may change POV to a character's (limited), but only implicitly, through fact selection. These cowards believe that by limiting their infinite narcissism through slapping "limited" onto their shiny label, they adequately respond to the obvious criticism that the selection of facts can only be biased, and are thus uplifted to even higher peaks of "realism."

The promised funky books

These novels are among the most popular classics, as I'm not particularly well read, and my only concern here is the funky narrator topic. But I wholeheartedly recommend them to other sci-fi lovers interested in the historical roots of their favorite genre.

Lucian of Samosata - True history (~150)

Historically the first, and one of the wildest sci-fi adventures I've read. It involves such things as traveling to the Moon and engaging in interplanetary warfare, high tech armor, strange metamorphic beings, rivers of wine and milk, a whale so big that entire countries segregated inside its belly, and much more.

There's only one narrator, a fictionalized Lucian, but the introductory section elaborates its meta theory. He starts by attacking the, let's call them "realists," the first of which he claims was Homer with his Ulysses, on account on telling a bunch of lies written in a deceitful way, convincing many to be truths. But Lucian chooses to do something different. Since his life lacked anything worth writing about, in his words:

I turned my style to publish untruths, but with an honester mind than others have done: for this one thing I confidently pronounce for a truth, that I lie

Looks like it's liar's paradox that powers this storytelling lunatic.

Thomas More - Utopia (1516)

Thomas More unfolds Lucian's rather abstract truth-paradox narrator into story elements. In the first part, More not only fictionalizes himself, but also friends and acquaintances. They send each other letters, where they also discuss current matters, and More eventually travels to Antwerp to meet this Raphael guy that supposedly had been on the island of Utopia (name means "not a real place") and who's the principal narrator.

Before listening to his story, they have a conversation that brings to light Raphael's moral/political philosophy (he claims that since thieves get the same punishment as murderers, after a robbery they might as well kill the witnesses), prompting More to suggest he should get a job as King's counselor. Like Leibniz later on, More is concerned about stupid kings fighting stupid wars and, with this book, contributes his share to the creation of the ever-future European Union.

Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605)

Like Lucian, Cervantes attacks an entire genre of knight-errand romances that, powered by the new printing press, flourished during the previous century, as sequels to Amadís de Gaula (1508), a retelling of a much older oral tradition Arthurian romance.^[1] Fictional Cervantes is supposedly only translating this book, originally written in Arabic by Cide Hamete Benegeli, a moor historian.

Since before the publishing of his second part, the first had become a hit, another writer using the pseudonym Avellaneda (real identity has never been established) used the opportunity and wrote an apocryphal sequel. In vol. 2 this very real book is not just included, but partially drives the plot. Don Quijote meets people that had read this cheap sequel and does things to prove to them that his impostor is fake and lame.

A deliberate carelessness with chronology (IRL there were 10 years between the volumes while in the story only 3 months have passed, not enough for the sequel to do its thing), including that inconsistent disappearance & reappearance of Sancho Panza's donkey from vol.1, blamed in vol. 2 on the poor memory of the previous narrator, makes it clear to the astute audience that these narrative contraptions are only meant as a pleasant diversion.

Sancho Panza has a most intriguing character development and essentially becomes the hero, undercutting the stock phrase generator impression that vol.1 left of him to Avellaneda, who greatly exaggerated this aspect in his envious parody.

The "big battle" plot beat is an elaborate story-within-a-story, technique also used by Shakespeare in The Tempest, considered by some as the first modern sci-fi, where a character, The Duke, stages a series of sumptuous plays inspired by the knight-errant romances, that are ostensibly taken as real events by our Caballero de la Triste Figura and his trusty escudero, only to incur a deep psychological reversal that leads to the ending.

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein: or the modern Prometheus (1817)

The device here is that Walton, Mary's main narrator, meets the dying Frankenstein (not a doctor, having quit school to pursue his passion for malpractice) on an arctic stranded boat, hears his confession and records it in a journal dedicated to his sister Margaret, to whom he previously sent a bunch of letters tracking his voyages, not knowing if he'll survive. The book contains a whole coven of sisters, progressively less fortunate than Walton's. Elizabeth, Frankenstein's beloved stepsister, dies because of his self-obsession, and The Creature's female companion does not even get born, same reason.

Although Margaret is unencumbered by such, Walton's characterization is quite developed:

Now I am twenty-eight, and am in reality more illiterate than many school-boys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind.

I love Mary Shelley. This is by far my favorite book on this list. It is entirely structured in this layered, hierarchical narrator style. At some point we switch to Frankenstein to hear his confession. In the middle of it he meats his Creature, at a mountain refuge in the Alps whose location is so vividly and accurately described that I was able to pinpoint it on the maps app.^[2] Once there we switch narrator again to hear The Creature's moving plaint. Then we descend over the other side of the narrators' man-tower.

Edgar Allan Poe - The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

There is just one narrator here, Pym, who's also the outer protagonist, a friend of the inner protagonist Augustus. Pym kinda sticks to the side of the crazy adventurer for the whole duration of the story, like a leech, and experiences the adventures somewhat vicariously, but still under direct threat. The first episode is a short story with Pym alone, trapped in the cargo hold of a ship for days, focused on detailed subjective experiences meant to subdue us like the hypnotist's swinging watch.

Poe does a lot of work to make it appear Pym is a real person, and had some success in this endeavor. He was a journalist, and started posting this part autobiographical, part repurposed adventure short stories, part poetic fantasy unholy conglomerate of a novel as a newspaper serial. When the book was published in full, it named Arthur Gordon Pym as author. He takes great attention to detail, such as using bits from popular at the time true stories of similar sea voyages.

Herman Meville in his Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851) greatly expands on this concept of a sea adventure with a quite developed outer protagonist narrator (Ishmael) that closely traces the inner protagonist's (Ahab) misadventures.

Conclusion

There's a massive heatwave here and, just like yesterday afternoon, a brutal summer storm just erupted out of nowhere and caused a power failure, so I think this is The Process God's way of telling me this unexpectedly long post is done for.