Book Review: The art of fiction by David Lodge (Penguin) - Part 12

Here are my favourite quotes/notes. I also added videos and/or links. This should not deter you from reading the whole book which is made up of texts and explanations and is fascinating and engaging.

33 - Coincidence

There is always a trade-off in the writing of fiction between the achievement of structure, pattern and closure on the one hand, and the imitation of life's randommness, inconsequentiality and openness on the other. Coincidence, which surprises us in real life with symmetries we don't expect to find there, is all too obviously a structural device in fiction, and an excessive reliance on it can jeopardize the verisimilitude of a narrative. 

34 - The Unreliable Narrator

[To my students: please see our lesson about Edgar Alan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart!!]
Unreliable narrators are invariably invented characters who are part of the stories they tell.
There must be some possibility of discriminating between truth and falsehood within the imagined world of the novel, as there is in the real world, for the story to engage our interest.
The point of using an unreliable narrator is indeed to reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and to show how human beings distort or conceal the latter.

35 - The Exotic

[using exotic places allows the author to] manipulate, juxtapose and counterpoint signifiers of home and abroad.

Task
 Make a mindmap of what you learnt about the unreliable narrator and share it in the comments :)