There are two 1st person narrators in The Collector who are telling the event from each point of view. The story is dictated by Ferdinand's recollective report. Miranda's part is told as a diary, also in past tense, but unlike Ferdinand's account, it gives a feeling of being told in present time and thus synchronal with the actions. They are both trustworthy and unreliable; the meticulously described events are detailed and credible, but the narrators' way of thinking and acting interfere with common perception of them as credible people.
Kidnapping and keeping a person looked up in a cellar of ones house is not a normal behaviour which does Ferdinand basically unreliable. The impression of disparity is further strengthened when he thinks his prisoner Miranda will start to like him just if he makes sure she is welled treated and is getting what she wants, as if feeding and turning a chrysalis into another butterfly to his collection. He ruminates this fixed idea throughout the story. “Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. // I thought, I can't ever get to know her in the ordinary way, but if she's with me, she'll see my good points, she'll understand. There was always the idea she would understand. (Fowles 19) I said I'd buy anything she wanted. (35) I just want you to try and understand me as much as you can and like me a little if you can.” (46)
Miranda is constantly comparing her life in captivity and the life she had in liberty with characters in books, plays, or art, describing things as an art student sees them, or using George Paston's (G.P) ideas, of her highly esteemed artist mentor, to define the world - as if she hermaphroditical is bringing forth her state of chrysalis longing for a butterfly metamorphosis. “I'll marry him [G.P.] if he wants. I want the adventure // Clever at knowing but not at living. I want his children in me. My body doesn't count any more. If he just wants that he can have it. // He has the secret of life in him (247)// I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch.” (248)
Both Ferdinand and Miranda are shielded from the world, each one in his own way, even before their common stay in the house. It seems as if Miranda has just as much of an obsessive way of seeking and creating essence out of existence as Ferdinand. Now if an author want to refine that point of view it becomes more reliable to a reader if he lets those characters carry their own voices; it is easier to relate to people's obscure ideas if an unreliable narrator is speaking of his own in 1st person narrator because an “I” associates directly with a readers “I” which makes thoughts and actions in a novel plausible, as if the reader himself were being addressed.
What reader would really trust that there exist a Ferdinand if an author lets a 3rd person narrator retell events taking place inside the walls of such a house; characters and actions would risk to appear to distant to associate and cope with.
REFERENCE LIST
Fowles, John (1998[1963]). The collector. London: Vintage
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