You are learning point of view & narrative voice: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (free indirect discourse & narrative perspective), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
The Strand Bookstore, Broadway & 12th, then dinner at Gramercy Tavern
The Strand claims to house eighteen miles of books. I have never measured, but the figure has always struck me as both a boast and an understatement — the kind of self-aggrandizing precision that an unreliable narrator would deploy. The books are there, certainly. Whether they amount to eighteen miles depends on how you define a mile and who is doing the walking.
I was browsing the fiction annex when I found a battered copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. The entire novel is an exercise in free indirect discourse — Stevens, the butler, narrating his life with such careful omission that the reader understands everything he cannot admit to himself. The interiority is devastating precisely because it is incomplete.
That evening at Gramercy Tavern, over duck with quince, I tried to explain this to a friend. 'The genius,' I said, 'is that Stevens believes he is telling a story about professional duty. The reader knows it is a story about love.' My friend considered this. 'So the unreliable narrator doesn't know he's unreliable?' Exactly. The aporia isn't a flaw — it's the architecture.
We ordered another glass of wine and I thought: every memoir is an unreliable narration. We are all Stevens, polishing silver while the world passes by.