#especially with nona emphasizing that aspect

[tooturtly]

Daily reminder that Alecto didn’t have to be a woman*. John could have made any body to shove the soul of the earth into. He could have picked a man, or a child, or literally anything. But he chose a woman.

And not just any woman! He specifically chose a barbie doll. An object. An object with heavy sexual and white beauty connotations. A doll which holds so much cultural weight and meaning for so many different people.

He could have chosen his mother or grandmother!!!!He could have depicted her as an actor or other real living person. But he chose a doll which had been part of his childhood expression (in both the complicated gender, sexuality, and power hierarchy meanings of that).

Which is so fascinating! It says so much about John as a person that in a moment which he himself describes as a level of insanity, he chose Barbie.

And I think we can say multiple things about that: he was physically manifesting his own complex relationships to gender by turning part of himself into a female form; he was upholding traditional gender norms by making her a woman; he was upholding white beauty standards of womanhood by picking Barbie; he recreated aspects of Christian creationism; he was insane and returned to the things he had been taught most basically.

And all of those different interpretations can be simultaneous! What John thinks he was doing (what he tells himself), what others think he was doing (how Harrow interprets it), what the reader interprets him as doing (see above), and the potential experience on Alectos part can all be different and bring new perspectives to the scene without there existing an “objective truth”.

What Johns experience says about himself, the reader, and our world that we live in is so fascinating. (The fact that he chose a human figure at all says a lot about how we as a collective value humans above all else) And I find him such an interesting character to analyse.

*I’m sidestepping the issue of defining woman, pls don’t ask me. It’s so complicated I couldn’t even begin.

[tooturtly]

I agree, but I would say that, while all narrators of tlt can be described as unreliable Narrators (unreliable being an adjective, referring to the ways the characters’ POVs are heavily tainted by the personal and internal working of their respective characters), only Harrow and John, and possibly Nona, are true Unreliable Narrators (this being the literary trope where a character either intentionally or unintentionally cannot be trusted as a credible source of information, i.e. to tell their own/another’s story).

Gideon does not fall into the latter category. While she doesn’t notice a lot of what’s happening, is limited by her lack of necromantic abilities, or only focuses on the parts of the story she finds important, this doesn’t make her an Unreliable Narrator (ops point). Not noticing some of what’s happening is a part of her POV, and can also be seen in the mystery genre, which GtN can fall into.

However, I would make the argument that Harrow, and to some extent Nona, can fall into this category (though again, agreeing with op that this term gets thrown around a lot in the fandom).

Harrow is haunted, she’s actively hallucinating for large chunks of this novel, she’s actively rewriting the events of the previous book, she has given herself a lobotomy to do so. In a way, she has made herself an Unreliable Narrator. Harrow perceives herself as an Unreliable Narrator, she knows this to be true. But the tension between her assumption and what’s happening is one of the core themes of the plot.

Does the fact that the things she think she’s hallucinating are actually a result of her being haunted by Wake and Alecto change this status? In my opinion, sort of but not really. I can foresee a lot of really fun arguments over this specific point though, and I excitedly await them. But as of now I stand by my opinion that Harrow should get to be called an Unreliable Narrator.

John also falls into this category because he’s a known liar. He’s lied to everyone for ten thousand years, including his closest friends. I do not trust him to tell a story where he’s doing things that are objectively wrong. His sections of NtN are a fantastic insight, however, into how he has rationalized his actions to himself, and how he perceives things he views as having been necessary. I think John is an Unreliable Narrator primarily because not only is he willing to lie to others, but he most assuredly lies to himself.

Lastly, Nona could fall into the category of Unreliable Narrator because she is a child. She’s six months old and she has no idea what’s going on. She has no preconceived notions of how the world works, she is only describing what she is observing and how she interprets those things. It’s a similar vibe to how Gideon is, but much more extreme because of how little understanding of the world Nona is working off of. Again, all of this is an intentional aspect of the book Muir wrote, with part of the puzzle being Nona herself.

I would say that ultimately, Unreliable Narrator is more of a spectrum when it comes to these books, with John at one end and Gideon at the other, with Nona and Harrow in between. And I also hope to hear more opinions about this concept!

what fandom should have a term taken away from then until they learn what it means and why is it the locked tomb fandom with unreliable narrator