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Originally Posted by Catlady
Limited is not necessarily unreliable. You seem to be saying that any and every first-person narrator = unreliable narrator, and I don't buy that. There's nothing to compromise Kathy's account. She doesn't mention escape attempts, therefore i think it's safe to say that the author doesn't want us to believe anyone has ever attempted to escape.
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Well, in truth, every first person narrator is unreliable - just ask a policeman - but that's not actually what I meant. A narrator can tell you everything they know, the full truth as they know it, and still not be reliable about some things because they don't know any different.
Sometimes a writer will choose first person perspective for immediacy and emotive purposes, and in such cases it is not their intention that you would doubt the narrator. But in many other cases the first person viewpoint is chosen to deliberately limit the perspective, and I think that is the case here. (It may not be the only reason, but I think it is a big part of it.) The entire book is constructed around keeping the technicalities and long history that led to the context as entirely vague and ill defined. There is every reason to expect that these clones are not told everything (indeed, this is explicitly stated), so of course Kathy's knowledge of the wider context is inherently limited. Then there's the fact that she is looking back over many years, and memory becomes distorted over time (and this is another fact we are explicitly told - by Kathy herself, eg: "Or maybe I’m remembering it wrong").
Added: I don't think it's a matter of the author wanting or not wanting us to believe there was ever any escape, I think it's a matter of the author wanting us to look at the story they have written, not the one they chose not to write.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Those are examples of passivity, not altruism. As far as Kathy's pride in her work, that's an example, perhaps, of her compassion for her fellow clones, not her belief that she and they are serving a greater good. (And I don't think you can call her unreliable on the one hand to dismiss my point, and then use her self-evaluation as a carer on the other hand to support your point.)
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Kathy's pride in her work is something she knows of her own experience, and relates to recent memory (as well as the past). It is more reliable than details from longer ago, or that she has no reason to know from her own experience.
Their behaviour can be both passive and altruistic. It's partly a manner of perspective and definition. A truly passive version of this would be if they sat in the cottage watching TV until someone told them to get up and go to training. That's not what happens. In their own time, they choose to move on. They don't struggle against what we might see as their doom, and so it seems passive, but nor do they shirk what they have been taught is their role and responsibility in life: they walk toward it, they are not pushed.