One of the aspects in A Head Full of Ghosts that I have found to be the most compelling is the choice of the narrator being Merry Barrett. Something that we touched on in our earliest classes was whether Merry is a reliable narrator for the events of the novel. I do not feel that we spent enough time on this debate, especially after Merry’s big reveal to Rachel about how her family died in chapters 25 and 26.
In chapter 3, Merry says, “my memories mix up with my nightmares, with extrapolation, with skewed oral histories from my grandparents and aunts and uncles, and with all the urban legends and lies propagated within the media, pop culture, and the near continuous stream of websites/blogs/YouTube channels devoted to the show…so all of it hopelessly jumbles up what I knew and what I know now” (Tremblay 13).
This quotation called into question whether or not Merry is a reliable narrator, through Merry’s own admission. Throughout the novel, I forgot that Merry said this, and became fully trusting of her recounting. This trust was most likely brought on by Merry’s narration switching from her 23-year-old self to her 8-year-old self so seamlessly (even though, in the diegetic world, the 23-year-old Merry is saying what we are hearing the 8-year-old Merry says). However, once Merry revealed that she was the one who slipped the potassium cyanide into the pasta sauce that poisoned her sister and parents, this quotation popped back into my mind.
I am not sure that Merry made up the fact that she was the one who put the potassium cyanide in the sauce; I definitely do not think that someone would lie about that fact. Yet, I am not sure that I trust Merry admitting to the poisoning either Merry, however, goes on to say that, “I’ve never told anyone what I’ve admitted to you. The police, psychologists, my aunt; no one” (Tremblay 281) Merry thus shows that she has been lying for many years.
For some reason, this called a lot of the narrative into question—at least for me—that we are given because it is given to the reader by Merry, someone who I find to be an unreliable narrator, much like Pi from Life of Pi or Huck Finn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Can we trust what Merry has told us? Can we trust a 23-year-old woman recounting something that happened when she was 8? Even if it was something so traumatic, I think the answer is no.
Works Cited
Tremblay, Paul. A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2015. Print.