Unreliable narrators and uninhibited characters in "Storyteller" and "Tabula Rasa"

Like Eryn, I’m going to combine my posts on “Tabula Rasa” and “Storyteller,” because I need to write about them and because I think they do go well together. In both, the characters profess to have a certain objective standpoint (or if they don’t direct profess it, it’s implied, as in “Tabula Rasa” when they are wiped of their memories and have to start anew). In “Storyteller,” Andrew insists that he is a “detached journalist” committed to the truth – but in fact, he’s actually very emotionally tied to the footage he’s shooting (like when he’s mouthing what Xander and Anya are saying to each other…?). He also takes time to discuss his personal life, and when Buffy chastises him (“Life isn’t a story, Andrew!”) we experience one of those narrative shifts that also occur in Dracula and in Northanger Abbey. Suddenly we realize that Andrew is, to an extent, an unreliable narrator who is under an onslaught carried out by his heroine, Buffy.

In a way, I think “Tabula Rasa” exhibits the polar opposite situation (and that’s why we can discuss how they relate to each other so easily); in this episode, the characters are essentially left to their own devices, forced to reinvent their place in their friends’ lives, in Sunnydale, and in the world. Willow, who is responsible for what the characters’ memory loss, is driven by a kind of desire for control over situations that reflects what a literary theorist might call narrative intrusion (when a narrator comments on an element of the story or gives it a certain slant so as to steer it in a certain direction or make the text more self-aware – that’s my own definition, and I don’t know how accurate it is, but still). She alters the landscape of her friends’ minds, thereby severely cutting off their authority as contributing authors of the story. So the way I see it, these two episodes are self-referential in that they deal with storytelling, authorial influence, and gothic “shifts” in tone.