Quoted in:
Actress:
— You ever going to ask me out, Will?
— I’m just waiting for the right moment.
— That’s good to know. Alright. I’ll see you around.
— Abby, I’m waiting for the right moment because when I ask you out, there’s not going to be any turning back for me. I’m not going to date anybody else for the rest of my life, I’m not going to love anybody else for the rest of my life. I’m not going to really care about anything else for the rest of my life. I’m waiting for the right moment, Abby, because when I ask you out, it’s going to be the most important moment of my life, and I just want to make sure that I get it right.
Unreliable narrator! Unreliable narrators are considered a device, right? Don't answer. They are. They are and they don't get a lot of literary analysis because it's a gimmick. It's a trick. I mean "Canterbury Tales" gets a shoutout because, you know, it's good but typically it's used for popcorn crime novels and thriller movies. Agatha Christie, "Usual Suspects", so on and so forth. But I'm going to argue that every narrator by its very definition is unreliable because when you tell a story there's always an essential distance between the story itself and the telling of said story, right? So therefore every story that has ever been told has an unreliable narrator. The only truly reliable narrator would be someone hypothetically telling a story that unfolds before our very eyes which is obviously very impossible. So what does that tell us? That the only truly reliable narrator is life itself. But life itself is also completely unreliable because it is constantly misdirecting and misleading us and taking us on this journey where it is literally impossible to predict where it is going to go next. Life as the ultimate unreliable narrator!