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The introductory chapter examines Proust's philosophy, arguing that it is both coherent and original. Particular attention is paid to Proust's moraliste-inspired philosophy of mind: many of the fundamental aspects of the novel, from its theories of knowledge and memory to the narrator's system of “laws” — several of which apply only to himself or, at best, to those like him, and others of which reveal themselves to be mere provisional hypotheses — testify, it turns out, to the complex interactions of intuition and intellect. This chapter also issues a warning: Proust's philosophy cannot be derived directly from the claims put forward in his novel. Readers must keep the first-person narrator (“Marcel”) separate from Proust if they are to read the Recherche correctly. Careful examination of the novel shows, and documentary evidence corroborates, that Proust periodically makes Marcel adopt (and sometimes abandon) certain beliefs he himself considers to be erroneous. Marcel's views, then, are not always identical to Proust's views. Moreover, Marcel's novel — the one he begins writing at the end of the story — is not identical to Proust's novel. For in spite of what almost all readers have assumed, Marcel does not end up writing In Search of Lost Time. Just as Proust's philosophy diverges (in part) from Marcel's philosophy, so too does Proust's literary project diverge (in part) from Marcel's literary project. It follows that only a careful reading can allow us to reconstruct the belief system of Proust himself, and his project in writing the Recherche. Proust, it turns out, wishes to offer himself as an exemplar of creativity, his character as a model of philosophical self-fashioning, and his massive novel as a training-ground for lucid self-delusion.

This chapter focuses on the hypochondriac's lack of credibility as self-narrator, and the resulting necessity for autobiographers of hypochondria to distance themselves from their frightened protagonist selves. It compares the narratorial strategies of such autobiographers with the strategies used by clinicians to makes sense of those patients (including hypochondriacs) who are considered to be “poor historians”-unreliable narrators of their own condition. By examining the hypochondriac narrator as inescapably self-reflexive and theoretical, we gain insight into the need for similar reflexiveness in medicine. The chapter argues that medicine itself needs to theorize its own doubts.

Mignon’s fortunes in the twentieth century are explored in this chapter primarily through works in which she passes over the threshold of sexual maturity and encounters exploitation and corruption, e.g. Wedekind’s Lulu plays (and Berg’s opera), Gerhart Hauptmann’s novella Mignon, and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: the fall of Lulu and the short-lived ‘rescue’ of Aga-Mignon by Hauptmann’s unreliable narrator are counterbalanced by a more positive denouement in Carter’s magic realist plot. This chapter also discusses an allusion to Thomas’s opera in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and the interest of Maria Kaschnitz for Mignon, whom she turns in an early novel into a figure of eternal return. Films featuring Mignon (including Wim Wenders’s Falsche Bewegung) are reviewed, and the chapter ends with an American novel (by Kim Chernin) of the dawning twenty-first century in which Mignon appears as an object of homoerotic desire.

This chapter covers some central topics related to narrative fiction, taking as its starting point the Radical Fictionalist focus on peripheral discourse and fictional telling. In particular, the chapter discusses certain features of allegedly inconsistent fictions and of storyworld importation, with particular attention to the theory in David Lewis’ ‘Truth in Fiction’ and to the case of postmodernist literature. The chapter also discusses some aspects of unreliable narratives, and it puts forth an analysis of alleged cases of importation by appealing to the closure of peripheral discourse. Finally, this chapter defends a Radical Fictionalist take on the distinction between nested and framed narratives.

Exploring the interpretative game Wolfe plays with the reader, this chapter highlights the potential difficulties that such a game may pose for the critic. In so doing, it argues that Wolfe makes a concerted effort to establish parallels between the reader's reception of his work and the trials of his misguided, manipulated protagonists. In essence, it indicates how Wolfe extends his thematic preoccupations into his texts’ hermeneutic circles. It draws attention to how Wolfe compels the reader to experience his particular conception of existence by utilizing, either singly or in combination, four key strategies: the employment of unreliable first-person narrators, the introduction of ambiguity and ellipsis, the inclusion of an often dense intertextuality, and the subversion or hybridisation of familiar generic conventions. The chapter observes that such literary games-playing has fostered consistent misreadings of The Urth Cycle. It concludes by arguing that The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun can be productively reassessed in the context of the recurrent themes characterising Wolfe's oeuvre.

This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative. In the face of the positive treatment of the off-screen in film studies over recent decades, the chapter defends Sternberg against the criticisms leveled at cinemas of mere spectacle. The carnival atmosphere and unreliable narrator of The Devil Is a Woman are prompts for investigating and contesting the fictional world by which a viewer frames the individual shots of a film. The eccentric architectural space of The Blue Angel (1930) is treated as a reason for attributing to Sternberg a longer-term interest in disentangling cinema from the viewer’s cognitive practice of elaborating, with the help of the off-screen, a world around the shots of which a film is composed.

The young generation of musicians such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis who shook up jazz in the 1980s arrives on screen in the following decade. Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and the cable-TV movie Lush Life fictionalize successful musicians of the era. Underage players also show up, as in 1940s movies: a teenage Toronto trumpeter gets advice from good and bad mentors in one, and a young pianist grapples with Tourette’s syndrome in another. In the 1990s, we see an outbreak of historical tales with unreliable narrators: a sometimes fanciful biopic of early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and Woody Allen’s extended tall tale Sweet and Lowdown, one of two 1990s films with a guitarist beholden to Django Reinhardt. In several particulars, Robert Altman’s Kansas City parallels his earlier film named for a musicians’ hub, Nashville, but in Kansas City, jazz doesn’t invade the main story.

This short chapter looks at instances of jazz musicians as characters in mainstream entertainment after 1992. Unreliable narrators tell tall jazz tales, in the film The Legend of 1900 and on TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Two jazz musicians save the day in Tom Hanks’s rock movie That Thing You Do! A jazz snob taunts a 1960s folk musician in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. The discussion also reaches back to some earlier fiction films in which jazz luminaries Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Anita O’Day perform in incongruously modest venues—ending with Benny Golson’s appearance in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal. Other films are also discussed.