1. How reliable a narrator is Owen Brown? What parts of his narrative do you find circumspect?

[Jen]

1. How reliable a narrator is Owen Brown? What parts of his narrative do you find circumspect?

[Zombie]

I didn't even think of this as an issue, since he spoke more of feelings and perceptions than of facts.

[Patrick]

He is as reliable as the fiction allows him to be. On many occasions, he reassures Miss Mayo that he will not repeat everything that has been said and written about his father's actions, but that he will present some "facts" as he saw/experienced them. It would have been great to verify his version with the contents of John Brown: A Biography Fifty Years After. Finally, one element of doubt spun by Banks: the narrator could well have been a ghost, as the action is dated to 1909, while the real Owen Brown died in 1889.

[Eadie]

I found Owen Brown somewhat unreliable in the fact that he claimed to be against slavery yet when Lyman Epps, a black slave who was rescued and lived with Browns on their farm, accidentally shoots and kills himself in circumstances that Owen could have prevented if he had acted in time.
Owen thus convinces himself that he is a murderer and can atone for this act only by becoming the coldblooded killer of slave owners and destroyer of slavery that he believes his father wants him to become. "I was the man," Owen writes, who had never been able to forget that Lyman, while he lived, was black. Thus, until this moment, I had never truly loved him. He was a dead man now -- finally, a man of no race. And as surely as if I had pulled the trigger myself, I was the man, the white man, who, because of Lyman's color and mine, had killed him. It was as if there had been no other way for me to love him.
There was nothing for love, now, but all-out war against the slavers.... Father would be my North Star.... I had become outwardly a hard man, a grim, silent warrior in my father's army, soon to be a killer more feared by the slavers for his cold, avenging spirit than any Free-Soil man in all of Kansas. More feared even than Father.

This is a work of fiction but in the real world: Lyman Epps did not shoot himself; he sang John Brown's favorite hymns at Brown's funeral, in North Elba.

[Kristel]

I find him as narrator to be questionable. He is remembering events that are influenced by his own emotions and interpretations. I started to wonder about him so I did look up the Brown family via Wiki to see how accurate the historical aspect was and that seems pretty good so far.

[[deleted user]]

Owen is only as reliable as anyone recounting events from their past, what they tell us is coloured by what they felt at the time and also by hindsight.

[John]

There were a couple times when Owen referred to events differently, inconsistently, so I was wondering if he was an unreliable narrator, but then there was an occasion (only one and otherwise unexplained) in which Susan Epps is referred to as Helen (I think - I didn't mark it), so perhaps Banks is the unreliable one?

I like Patrick's idea that the narrator is Owen's ghost, as that makes the scenes about the reinterment of the raiders in North Elba. That took place in 1899 (not thirty years (1889) after the raid as suggested by Owen), thus suggesting that Owen's presence was indeed ghostly. This mismatch in the dates isn't necessarily evidence of Owen's lack or reliability as the James McPherson article that Eadie quotes from also notes a large number of historical mistakes that aren't relevant to the story. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/...

[Kristel]

John wrote: "There were a couple times when Owen referred to events differently, inconsistently, so I was wondering if he was an unreliable narrator, but then there was an occasion (only one and otherwise unexp..."

I searched in my kindle edition and there is no mention of a Helen.

[John]

Kristel wrote: "John wrote: "There were a couple times when Owen referred to events differently, inconsistently, so I was wondering if he was an unreliable narrator, but then there was an occasion (only one and ot..."

So I've misremembered the name, and I can't find the spot; but I remember it was jarring at the time.

[Kristel]

John wrote: "Kristel wrote: "John wrote: "There were a couple times when Owen referred to events differently, inconsistently, so I was wondering if he was an unreliable narrator, but then there was an occasion ..."

I am 62% in to the book so I will watch out for it but maybe passed it already. The person who made a lot of mistakes like that was Murdoch after she started showing signs of Alzheimer's

[Diane]

You all make good points. I think I am in line with Book's answer.

[Kristel]

He is fairly reliable as narrators go except that he is telling us the story through his own experience and his own interpretation of the situations. I found him to have many issues. He was a jealous son, he did not feel his dad loved him much, he never accepted his stepmother, he probably had survivor guilt. I found it somewhat interesting that Owen always wanted what he couldn't have. He never made a female acquaintance of his own, the woman on the boat who was pregnant with another man's baby, the wife of Lyman. I wan't sure what or why he always wanted the affection that didn't belong to him.

[John]

Really interesting observation, Kristel

[Pip]

I thought that Owen was homosexual, he was in love with Lymann Epps, he couldn't reconcile his feelings so he subliminated them into desire for Susan Epps, and Lymann committed suicide because of all this. I thought Fred was also homosexual and that was why he mutilated himself. I also imagine that none of this really happened historically.

[John]

Pip wrote: "I thought that Owen was homosexual, he was in love with Lymann Epps, he couldn't reconcile his feelings so he subliminated them into desire for Susan Epps, and Lymann committed suicide because of a..."

Correct

[Kristel]

Correct, they were homosexual or it never happened?

[John]

Never happened. Epps sang at John Brown's funeral.

Owen just didn't have the role in real life that he had in the book. He didn't go to London, he wasn't the one in the tree (that was John Cook).

The broad strokes about John Brown are fairly accurate, but the rest is pretty much fiction (as opposed to historical fiction).