Okay, you mentioned that Eli is an unreliable narrator in an ask you answered, which is a term I hear thrown around a lot but have never really understood. What makes a narrator unreliable and what makes Eli in particular an unreliable narrator?
ahhh alright it's a little more complicated in literary theory BUT basically an unreliable narrator is a character that is
a) purposefully lying to the reader and/or
b) lacking information about something and 'assuming' things that aren't true and/or
c) lying to themselves about something which we as readers assume is them telling the truth.
i don't think any character ever is 100% reliable but some are arguably much less reliable than most. and i think - even though non-first person unreliable narrators are rare - that eli's doing a lot of what i specified in b) and c). in minor ways, but still noticeable. and it makes him so, soooo interesting to me
one of the simplest (and one of my favorite) examples is this:
“I wasn’t able to get anything on why Captain Virgilio was replaced,” Eli murmured as they followed the procession of officers escorting the new commander, Captain Filia Rossi, on her tour of the Blood Crow. “But everyone agrees that Rossi’s very well connected. Nowadays, that’s all you need to get a command.”
“I see,” Thrawn said.
Eli grimaced. I see. That was Thrawn’s go-to answer when he didn’t want to say anything else. (thrawn, chapter 7)
thing is, later in that novel and in the ascendancy series we learn that thrawn is politically inept (whether he pretends to be or not is another fun thing to think about) and that he often says I see when he doesn't get at all what the other person is saying. there's three occurrences i can think of at the top of my head, when he's talking to ar'alani or thalias or thrass about political shit.
it's pretty obvious that eli didn't have all the information here, so he tells us what he thinks is the truth.
what eli also does is that sometimes he tells us what he feels but he doesn't act accordingly?
one example i can think of right now is that he 'justifies' the empire's actions a lot, like what the imperials are doing is fine → 'isb interrogators are necessary for keeping order', not arguing harder against slavery, saying that it'll take a long time for him to not think of it as 'his empire' anymore when he's in the ascendancy
but when you read the novels you get the feeling that he hates the empire and everything associated with it → 'isb interrogators go out of their way to be disliked and feared', 'the emperor will kill you if you displease him', being annoyed as hell at other imps a lot, his whole thing with the death troopers
here i think he's deliberately not telling us - or himself - the whole truth, one way or another.
but tbh in the end it's really just a matter of personal interpretation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
