Unreliable narrator

It's actually one of my favourite devices for an author to use - I think I read too many books as a child that assumed kind of complicit trust, or suspension of disbelief, for the reader.

So, trusting HH is difficult: he talks about his photographic memory:
"I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry
in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) ... then, I copied it out with obvious abbrevia-
tions in my smallest, most satanic hand...."

And Charlotte's letter to HH - this is not her kind of language:
"You see, there is no alternative. I have loved you from the minute I saw you. I am a passionate
and lonely woman and you are the love of my life. . . . Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny
while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces
(illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon très, très cher, what a world of love I
have built up for you during this miraculous June!"

As we discussed in class, Charlotte is unfairly treated by HH in his prose; he's remembering her a little differently (i.e. more bovine) than she perhaps appeared to him - in contrast with her daughter.

F.W. Dupree says of Charlotte: she is "whatever it is that spoils the party and dampens the honeymoon all across America." - not too different to HH's opinions...