The True And Truly False Analysis

Roy Arthur Swanson’s “The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical Science Fiction” discusses the use of the liar’s paradox and states, “to admit that one is lying is to be truthful. The comic paradox is that falsehood can be a form of truth (telling the truth that one is lying) just as Socratic ignorance can be a form of knowledge (knowing that one does not know)” (228). When humor is added to the false conceptions, it becomes the distraction and a challenge for distinguishing what from what. These narrators are honest about the falseness, making it true, which creates a mess of unreliability readers find entertaining, and yes, even normal. Eggers and Andrew share features of craving control and wanting a relief from their tragedies. The humorous voice and liar’s paradox gives them that relief. There is, no doubt, veracity in their self-rationalizing, even if they are uncanny and questionable, for it does not mean they are untruthful concerning the themes they are mocking. Andrew’s Brain powerfully address the issues of human consciousness and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius contemplates the very act of storytelling. Doctorow and Eggers’ intentions are the same as a tricksters: raw, real, and cunning.

Furthermore, Eggers and Doctorow are producing a game for readers with their unreliable narrators.

Their protagonists are aware of the unreliability and they blatantly illustrate it, thus, fabricating their lies, and truthfully telling readers they are false. Eggers’ consistently is messing around with his readers: “too much view to seem real, but then again, then again, nothing really is all that real anymore, we must remember, of course, of course. (Or is it just the opposite? Is everything more real? Aha)” (52). Eggers’ authority as the author is downplayed, which shows the liar’s paradox entwining the reliable and unreliable voice of the narrators. Eggers desperately tells

readers,

I can do last breaths, last words. I have so many things. There is so much symbolism. You should hear the conversations Toph and I have, the things he says. It’s wonderful, it’s unbelievable, you couldn't script it any better… Let me share this. I can do it any way you want, too—I can do it funny, or maudlin, or just straight, uninflected—anything… I will be the beating heart. Please see this! (235-236)

He conveys his past as a caricature he must create in order to be entertaining for his audience. It is all an act, and throughout his memoir, Eggers constantly acknowledges the falseness.

Andrew is honest about his actions from the start, stating, “Deep down at the bottom of my soul, if such exists, I am finally unmoved by what I’ve done. A faint tinge of regret for dead babies, for dead wives, for the fires I’ve inadvertently started, and all such disasters can make me run in my dreams to someplace where I can’t do any harm, but in this waking life I am numb to my guilt” (Doctorow 18). Although, for the whole duration of the novel, Andrew is confused and unpredictable about his past tribulations, viewing them as dreams, because he mixes his unconscious and conscious mind. Eggers and Andrew are crazy, yet honest protagonists. People associate reliability with honesty, and unreliability as, for a lack of a better term, acting crazy. Crazy or honest-- which coyote wins in the game of narratology? Because of the liar’s paradox, there is no winning characteristic; the two are one in the same if the essence of the trickster figure is manifested in the first-person narrations of Eggers and Doctorow.

In conclusion, First-person humorous unreliable narrators reveal nostalgic, yet schizophrenic traits if viewed through a trickster literary lens, and it is worthy of attention because a reader’s own perception and the traditional form of narrative becomes skewed and challenged. Countless critics believe humor and unreliability construct a distance between the reader and narrator. I believe there is no distance whatsoever. In the end, a first-person narrator, without a doubt, is closely linked to each individual reader. Vladimir Voinovich wrote in his notable satire, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “After all, the hero of your book is like your own child, you get what you get, you just don’t fling him out the window. Maybe some other people’s children are a little better, a little smarter, but still you love your own more just because he’s your own” (21). Readers are blind by the logic because it is that simple. I would go farther and argue that the reason we like unreliable narrators is because unreliable narrators are us. “A mysterious intervening translation agency connecting us in our own language to a shadow world where humans like us were speaking to one another… but from such otherwordly distances that you could not hear them, though they seemed to hear themselves” (Doctorow 54-55). Tricksters are this world, and it is not obvious because the definition of “trickster” is veritably a trick.

There is no significant point other than readers like unreliable narrations—just as readers enjoy to reminisce, go mad at the act of reading, and laugh. An unreliable narrator is a paradox because the narrator attempts to prove some form of truth, theme, or social pattern that is simultaneously intriguing and familiar, and with information that is not true. People are drawn to uncertainty. Readers create optimistic ideals, which designs the “game.” Language is not a game until the reader reads. Likewise, that is why Eggers’ memoir is a disguise; it is a mask from the real. Unlike Andrew’s Brain, because it is fiction; there is no need for the book to wear a mask.

Society is obsessed with making sense of everything and achieving answers. So, of course, literary critics view literature as a means to find meaning, since reading’s most prominent motive is to induce a variety of interpretations in order for a text to live on forever. Nevertheless, why do critics believe there remains a distance between the reader, text, and writer when the text is considered humorous or unreliable? Could it be for the same reason critics find it controversial to study the trickster figure without their specific Indigenous context? Is there not any significant meaning? And if there is not, does that make a text insignificant?

The trickster literary lens establishes the inner depths of literature. There is no color in truth-- black and white-- until the trickster arrives and raises truth into question. Literature, essentially, is written words, nothing more, until readers take control. And even that is a complication because a reader’s perspective constantly shifts. Equally important, Hyde proclaims the trickster figure uncovers the paradox of Truth: “Not that it isn't necessarily the case that there is no truth, nor that we never have intimations of it, only that we can’t in any sense finally arrive at it. We can orient ourselves, but we cannot arrive” (289). If a text has no point, or a lost truth as Hyde concludes, the interpretations are infinite and timeless. Eggers and Doctorow’s postmodern books are inferring that one’s nostalgia and interpretation of a text will never be clear. Postmodernism is a lost truth, whereas, say, the Romanticism era was used to speak the truth within a creative construction. Nostalgia and a reader’s interpretation are imaginary, which is why schizophrenia is closely linked in Andrew’s Brain and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The writers just happen to be funny about it. If there’s no point, it won’t end.