Imogen Binnie's Unreliable Narrators

Abstract

This essay makes the case that Binnie has crafted an unreliable narrator in the 2012 short story “I Met a Girl Named Bat Who Met Jeffrey Palmer,” and it then extends that argument to her 2013 novel Nevada. The literary device of the unreliable narrator has long been, and continues to be, entangled with the status of bodies, racialized, colonized, sexualized, neurodiverse, gendered, age categorized, and so on. My contention is that Binnie ought to be recognized for the way she claims the fictional device of the unreliable narrator for a modern US trans context. As this essay contends, Nevada may depict the experiences of being trans in all kinds of insightful ways, but it makes the comic absurdity of ever adequately creating a reliable framework to explicate being trans into its structuring starting point. In developing the unreliable narrator as a riposte to trans legibility, Binnie's fiction instances what Grace Lavery calls “trans realism.”