Geeta makes a cake; the smell slides through the vents in my apartment, warm and cloying.

The cake is vanilla.

I hate vanilla. I’m more of a hamburger cake guy. I know I’m not the one organizing or planning this wedding, because I don’t care, but couldn’t she cater more to my tastes?

That’s what a good wife does.

She calls me but I don’t pick up. I know why she’s calling anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

I mean, I got things to do.

Like visiting the museum in order to, ahem, top up my finances.

There’s also the karaoke bar, where my mom’s giving free drinks. They turned out to be free drinks of water. Thanks, mom.

Know who I am: an avowed and unrepentant liar who will make my wrongdoings everyone else’s fault. I am probably just like your ex, Kevin. There’s a reason why he’s your ex.

I am telling you a true thing.

Here is another true thing: Geeta is controlling. She didn’t even ask me about the cake flavor.

So she gets what she gets.

A groomless wedding.

An unreliable narrator tells you some things that are true and some things that are false. But they show you who they are in their actions.

The unreliable narrator is one of those concepts that we all think is easy to grasp. The narrator is crazy, so she’s unreliable. The narrator’s a liar, so he’s unreliable. But it’s rarely so cut and dry. It’s been sixty years since Lolita was published, and some of us are still arguing whether Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator. Doesn’t Humbert tell the reader the truth: that he is attracted to underage girls, that he purposefully infiltrated the Haze home in order to get closer to twelve-year-old Dolores, that he kidnapped her after her mother conveniently died in order to rape her repeatedly?

Is a truth-telling monster therefore reliable?

Can the reader trust what the monster has to say?

I’m different, though. I’m no monster. I’m not punishing Geeta for not catering to my every whim. I just got caught up in the moment.

But Humbert is a piece of work.

Consider the entire reason for Humbert’s confessional: He is in prison for murder, and his lawyer has urged him to write out his side of the story. He is looking for sympathy. And when you believe Humbert when he says that Dolores Haze seduced him–that it is somehow her fault a man nearly thrice her age kidnapped her and took her on a sex tour of cheap hotels–he has found his sympathy. When you believe, on Humbert’s word, that Dolores is a brat and an unsympathetic character because it’s her nature and not because she acts out due to her stepfather regularly raping her, he’s duped you.

It was easy for Humbert to dupe you, because he told some truths, and he told some lies, and the lies that he told are considered true in American society. Our society believes a 13-year-old can seduce a man in his thirties, rendering him somehow powerless to say “no.” Our society believes teen girls are brats by nature.

And so you believe the monster is playing it straight. The monster is reliable. The monster can be trusted to give us a true and accurate account.

Nabokov can’t count on you to see the clues he left in Humbert’s narrative: Humbert regularly lies to other characters. Humbert is seeking your sympathy despite his heinous confessions. Humbert is currently in jail.

The author of the unreliable narrator requires you to see through him. Otherwise, the author has just written asshole apologia.

But hey, at least you know there’s nothing to see through with me.

I mean, was it so difficult for Geeta to ask me my preferences for something I already said I didn’t give a shit about? It’s her fault I’m here, really.

Not to mention, I did something good while I was out.

I set up Geeta’s hopeless son, Raj. And that makes me right.

Right? Right.