Unreliable Narrators and Suggestive Ambiguity

Unreliable narrators - whose voice-over narrations are unreliable by virtue of their youth and naïveté, by their inability to grasp the nature and meaning of what they describe, and by virtue of their faulty moral sense. Furthermore, a narrator who may be in error in his or her understanding or report of things and who thus leaves readers without the guides needed for making judgments. This notion of unreliable narrator is present in Linda's character in Malick's Days of Heaven and in Lardner's "Haircut". There is also a sense of irony in both of these works. An example of unreliable narration in "Haircut" is when the barber (narrator) is describing the love at first sight between Doctor Stair and Julie Gregg, "so he left my old lady inside and come out to the front office and that's the first time him and Julie met and I guess it was what they call love at first sight. But it wasn't fifty-fifty. This young fella was the slickest lookin' fella she'd ever seen in this town and she went wild over him. To him she was just a young lady that wanted to see the doctor." The barber then states, "I said a minute ago that it was love at first sight on her part. I'm not only judgin' by how she acted afterwards but how she looked at him that first day in his office. I ain't no mind reader, but is was wrote all over her face that she was gone." This is unreliable narration because this is the narrators understanding of the situation and his opinion. The narrator may be wrong in his interpretation of what is going on between the attraction of the two characters this is illustrated when he says, "I guess it was what they call love at first sight."