Would you buy a used car from your narrator?

Sometimes, when the telephone rings and you answer it, instead of waiting for some kind of gated-community security assurance from the answering machine, you are greeted by a complete stranger who introduces with some vague job description.  "With the Sheriff's Department," or "From a Research and Marketing Division," or even the more prosaic, "This call may be monitored by quality control to see that you are being given courteous service."  This introduction is invariably followed by an inquiry, ambiguous enough to allow interpretation of How is your health today? or How is your attitude today?  The question is the casual-sounding How are you, today?  To which you, with increasing frequency, reply, "When someone I don't know calls to ask how I am, I suspect they are reading from a script and either want money or want to sell me something?

What are the qualities and characteristics of a narrative voice that arouse such varying responses as suspicion, reliability, boredom,hostility?

Setting aside the obvious answer that differing stimuli transmit these responses variously, we repeat the question, looking for the lowest possible common denominator of "tells," signs by which we judge the intent and integrity of a narrative source.

In our mind, we compose lists of selling voices, starting with the now iconic used car sales person, the telephone solicitor, the telephone sales person, the religious enthusiast wanting to "sell" or promote a particular path to either salvation, redemption, or outright merging with the godhead; the politician, he who warns of dire consequences, or the recruiter in some cause.  All these have apparent motives which will be revealed if we hear the narrator out, which makes us cynical in a way we have rarely been cynical:  their entire pitch is predicated on our agreeing to something because we are bored and want to get rid of them.

There are more subtle voices, although it is often debatable how subtle their intent, that carry hidden political agendas secretly reeking of elitism, protectionism, racism, and perhaps verging upon delusion.

Would we buy a used car from our own narrator?  Indeed, why did we chose this particular narrator or narrative form?  At first blush, the multiple point of view appears to be the most democratic and reliable since it allows us to take sides in our emotional assessment of the story, but this is not always a possible point of view, particularly in a short story.  Yeah, yeah; William Trevor manages it in a short story, but A) he is William Trevor and B) he has a track record of being empathetic to all his characters, even the ones with malign intent.

Look at the results of the narrator in Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, who starts things off with a rousing assertion, "This is the saddest story I ever heard," then, as the novel unfolds, appears not to have seen what was happening under his very nose.  In short, is anyone reliable or, for that matter, trustworthy?

Much as these questions may be interpreted to cut off narration entirely, it is floated forth as a greater indication that the narrator must have a personality, a motive for telling the story, an intent, and even an agenda.  Your own agenda in asking these questions is to help you arrive at the intent of the narration of a story you are living with quite a bit these days and which is reaching the point of wanting to be set down on paper--but through what filter?

Observations

1. Waiters in Chinese restaurants wear white socks.

2. Among the present incumbents in the United States Senate, the number of outright misfits and malingerers is so high that a panel composed of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans would not be able to agree on a list of the ten worst. My list would begin with Lott, R, MS; followed quickly by Lieberman, I, CON; and Landreaux, D, LA; Kyl, R, AZ; McConnell, R, KY; Bunning, R, KY;Hatch, R UT;Reid, D, NV;Cornyn, R, TX;Sessions, R, ALA. Yes, I know I have betrayed a bias, nor will it account for much when I argue that party-line biases are at a lower plateau for me than my dislike of the guarded equivocations and strategies set forth each time a politician opens a mouth. Happily, UTube will continue to show them all at their most wretched.

3. Moving to the House of Representatives, I'd head the list with Sensenbrenner, R, WISC; then Harmon, D, CA; Issa, R, CA; Hunter, R, CA;Lewis, R, CA;Wilson, R, NM; Cubin, R, WY;Boehner, R, O;Blunt, R, MO;Gallegly, R, CA. I understand that there are those who do not appreciate Congressmen Conyers, Frank, or Waxman. Nothing is easy, particularly with Congress, which Mark Twain referenced when observing that if America had a criminal class, it would be Congress.

4. Blue jam is acceptable, marmalade on occasion is perfect, but red jam rocks.

5. The variety store next to Scolari's Market has had a run of displaying non-anthropomorphic and non-animal pinatas, forcing me a few blocks north for this one at a store with even more variety, using horses, giddy ones, from the look of them.

6. Last week, in a regrettable decision, I allowed myself to be directed for lunch to one of the most iconic of all tourist traps in the area, Stearns Wharf.

Bad move.

Worse because, unable to eat what passed for lunch, I passed what seemed like protein to Sally, who paid for it later on and was driven to eat much grass.

7. Many of my short stories are set on university campuses or involve persons who have reason to be on university campuses. This is in large measure because of my observation that the university is such a landscape of territorial imperatives. (I seem to recall it being Robert Ardrey who invented that term, and a good one it is given teachers whose subtexts are jealousy of subject and avidity of tenure.) Being recruited to become a part of a team to develop an MFA program complete with mission statement and curriculum, I had brought home again the familiar pigeons of jealousy, assertiveness, divisiveness, and stubbornness. I've been told that such squabbling exists in law firms, hospitals, political parties, and newspapers. I've seen at first hand those pigeons in publishing houses large and small, to the point where I was once challenged to rationalize how I could wear a striped tie with a checkered jacket. But the university epitomizes for me the human condition writ large, with all its striations, its anthropology and its bureaucracy.

8. Since I am on the subject of observations, I will observe that this day, this eleventh day of August, has seemed magically charged in spite of being undershot with the threat of a fire growing out of control, the after effects of a messy driving misadventure, a number of misadventures with tourists from hell, which is to say Beverly Hills.

Although these ladies may appear to have come from Beverly Hills, they were merely attending the variety store where the pinatas were displayed, and I became taken with the.