“I only told the truth”: Unreliable Narration and the Question of Historical Authenticity in Jailbird

Abstract

Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird is one of the best example of historiographic metafiction. It follows the life story of Walter F. Starbuck which unfolds alongside a series of horrifying historical events, such as the labour movement, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Watergate scandal. These events occur side by side with fictional ones. Moreover, the novel brilliantly mixes historical with fictional figures to blur the line between history and fiction. Being a historiographic metafiction, Jailbird introduces an unreliable narrator whose narration is shaped by fragmented memory, guilty mind, and personal biases which makes it more like a defense document than a true account of past events. He mixes history with fiction in a way that confuses readers and makes them unsure which events and personages are real and which ones are fictional. In this sense, one might at first glance consider the novel’s history as unreliable and Starbuck’s narration as inauthentic. Yet, this article aims at proving that Starbuck’s narration, though unreliable, is authentic because it represents the era it seeks to represent. It adapts Ansgar Nünning’s model of unreliable narrator to detect where Starbuck’s unreliability occurs. Then, it analyzes how Starbuck’s narration helps readers understand the historical events he tries to portrays. In doing so, the present article shows that Starbuck’s unreliability does not prevent Vonnegut from achieving historical authenticity.