Unreliable Narration in Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is a collection of inter-relating short stories told through the eyes of a common narrator, one who seems to be reflecting on all of the events in the book. A common characteristic carried over throughout all of the stories seems to be the narrator's crippling addiction to several different narcotics, along with his constant reevaluation of his self-worth. The constant drug use, combined with the reliance on the narrator's at times hazy memory creates quite an unreliable narration.

One of the narrator's most rampant use of drugs happens in the story "Emergency," during his time working at a hospital with his friend Georgie. They took random pills together several times while working and off of work, with doctors and nurses blatantly noticing their inebriated behavior (or at least Georgie's). In this story however, the narrator stumbles a few times on some minor details in the story such as the order of certain events or what actually happened. For example, when the narrator is describing a story about running through a snowstorm to a drive-in movie theater with Georgie, ending with: "Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn't matter" (84). His hazy memory is apparent even in the first line of "Emergency," which started: "I'd been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended" (69).

The fact that the narrator is recalling all of these stories off of his assumingly aged memory creates an unreliable narration, since minor or possibly major events could be retold differently than how they originally happened. His drug use throughout the stories is also a contributing factor to his unreliability, not only because drugs can impact the narrator's sobriety (which it does in some of the stories), but due to the fact that over time certain drugs are linked to memory loss and impairment, making his memory even more unreliable. For all we know, as readers, the narrator could be making up every story for us on the spot, or possibly confusing details with another story he had heard at some other point in his life. These factors combined create the unreliable narration presented to us in Jesus' Son. It brings up the question whether or not former heavy drug users are capable of telling their life story without disorganizing some of the events which happened. I would like to remain optimistic and say that most of the memoirs and autobiographies from the 1960's, a time when drug use was rampant, are as accurate as possible, since in the event that they are as potentially unreliable as the stories told in Jesus' Son, it is tragic to think that a whole generation of stories and experiences could be potentially lost forever.

Source: Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson.