Allow me to introduce you to Kay because, without her, I might never have come across the histories of Jake and Audra. Kay is a dedicated and caring narrator, but she is ‘unreliable’ in the classic sense of the term.[1]
I might add that you should probably consider me to be equally unreliable. I am, after all, just another narrator, a second-level one, narrating the narrator who is Kay. She and I will be handing the ‘word’ back and forth to one another, so that makes ‘us’ a third narrator, a unit of some sort, however harmonious, fractured, or fractious this third may be. So you, our reader, have at the very least three narrators (Kay, me, and the Kay-me duo), and that’s before the stories unleash characters with their own ideas.
And what about you, dear reader… how reliable are you? The minute you clap your eyes on our sentences, you cease to be an innocent bystander. You are involved. You bring your own views and histories. You start comparing our stories to yours, changing things, and raising all kinds of questions. So, to borrow from the politicians, are we (the narrators) and you (the readers) all in this together, all in the same boat? But then what do we say about politicians, eh? Liars! Unreliable narrators if ever there were such ones.
Okay then, until something better comes along, let’s just go with this: we are each in some kind of boat. Kay is smiling now. “And the truth is a lover,” she says. “Somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere waiting for me,” she adds in sing-songy speech, before telling me that Bobby Darin sang this to her way back in October 1959, the very month of her fifth birthday. When Audra made a cake, the grandparents drove across state to be there, and Jake came home from work early. Bobby Darin and his song were all over the radio that fall. I suppose these memories are why Kay likes my choice of the boat metaphor. Humans latch onto ideas in this way, through little chains of incidents and notions that begin to take on meaning when viewed later.
At any rate, given the plurality of narrators and readers already gathering here, I aim to keep faith with James Phelan’s rhetorical definition of narrative as “somebody telling somebody else that something happened on some occasion and for some purpose(s).”[2]
We’re a bunch of somebodies. In boats.
But I promise to listen carefully and cautiously to what Kay says, watch her face and gestures, find other witnesses, and scrutinize her stated facts and memories. Sometimes, I will do the writing. Sometimes, Kay will take over. She’s like that, Kay, always trying to step back until some passion or objection grabs hold and she cannot relinquish her voice to me or anyone else. You’ll get used to her. She’s not all bad.
When she allows me to write, I hope to render Kay as truthfully as possible, because she is our renderer of Jake and Audra, her father and mother, who can no longer render themselves. Audra died in 2003 and Jake followed in 2012.
Beyond the Sea is an English-language version of Charles Trenet’s La Mer. Kay fell in love with this fact when she came across it, for reasons that only became apparent later in life.
[1] “An unreliable narrator can be defined as any narrator who misleads readers, either deliberately or unwittingly. Many are unreliable through circumstances, character flaws or psychological difficulties. In some cases, a narrator withholds key information from readers, or they may deliberately lie or misdirect.” Holly Seddon. See also the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms: a ‘narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted… The term does not necessarily mean that such a narrator is morally untrustworthy or a habitual liar (although this may be true in some cases), since the category also includes harmlessly naive, ‘fallible’, or ill-informed narrators. A classic case is Huck in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): this 14-year-old narrator does not understand the full significance of the events he is relating and commenting on.” For a general introduction to narrative theory, see Project Narrative.
[2] See, for example, James Phelan’s Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Ohio State University, 2017.
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