Unreliable narrators in stories

            These are my thoughts of a story I read for class (Emergency by Dennis Johnson) it had an unreliable narrator... 

            Whether his name is Jesus or not, I’m referring to the narrator of the story. Maybe I should call him “the clerk.”

            Jesus the Clerk and narrator of “Emergency” is a pretty untrustworthy source for the reader. This dude is high… stoned… on pills. I don’t know how to distinguish reality versus him being on the pills. What I think is a part of reality is Jesus the clerk working with Georgie, the nurse and I think Terrence, the patient, is real too… but I’m not sure. Anyway…

            I think the decision Dennis Johnson made here was cool because you can easily find multiple ambiguities in the scenes that are occurring throughout the story. Example, Jesus the clerk thinks he was in a military graveyard on page 81 and sees angels descending… then on page 87 his friend, Hardee, is there… the dude is bald because he was drafted (military.) Was he one of the angels in the military graveyard?  

            I found many parts of the story intolerable. It’s kind of like when you start reading a story only to find out it’s a dream… it pisses you off. I was pissed reading this. I don’t think I was mad at the narrator but at the author. “I’d never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity…” Here, we are being told what Jesus the clerk is seeing/experiencing but then Georgie influences what he is thinking when he tells him, “It’s the drive-in man!” ““I see. I thought it was something else,” I said.” This is an example of what I’m talking about when I say that you get the same effect of “And I woke up screaming full of heavy sweat” in a story. It’s irritating!

            Maybe drunks and stoners will appreciate this craft more than I do.