All of Us Are Honest, Second by Second
This is a newly formatted (but not, sadly, revised) copy of my undergraduate thesis for my English degree. It’s a study of John Gardner’s The Wreckage of Agathon, which may have been my first encounter, growing up, with a wholly unreliable narrator. Gardner’s conceit was to make Agathon both ureliable and a prophet. Agathon’s eminent likability, untrustworthiness and prophetic abilities prompted me to examine a number of qualities of narrative in general: the place of the character in relation to the author, the nature of truth in fiction and the importance of an awareness of the book.