The Stone Diaries

Because Daisy is both the protagonist and the omniscient narrator, we quickly learn that her accounts of events are sometimes exaggerated and often unreliable. This means that the world of the novel always oscillates between reality—the “truth” of the narrative—and the subjective fiction of her storytelling. Daisy herself, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third, often acknowledges herself as an unreliable narrator: “The recounting of life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted” (28).

Later, she writes, “Maybe now is the time to tell you that Daisy Goodwill has a little trouble with getting things straight; with the truth, that is,” and she also notes that “she imposes the voice of the future on the events of the past, causing all manner of distortion” (148). The idea of real versus imagined persists through to the final moments of Daisy’s life: As her mind and memory fail, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to distinguish reality and fiction, and she dreams different versions of her own reality as she faces death.

This distortion, and the novel as a whole, is playing on the

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