“Because I don’t know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.” Pg. 362
Blindsight is a striking novel for many reasons, but one of them in the main character, the narrator. His entire job aboard the ship is to act as a synthesist, which seems to be a glorified Captain’s Log of events. What I find interesting about this quote is not the idea that narrators can’t be trusted (Clockwork Orange has made that much clear) but the fact that this quote comes at the end of the book, the very last page. The entire point of his character is that he doesn’t lie, he doesn’t exaggerate, he barely has a personality, he simply observes what takes place.
For me, this sentence can mean several things in relation to the story, the first being is Siri really human? The context of this quote seems to imply that Siri is questioning whether or not he really is the last human or merely some sort of zombie pretending to be human. Siri is continuously referring to bodies as meat and flesh, which seems to imply that this baseline of humanity doesn’t hold true for Siri. He is more emotionless than many of his freakish compatriots, making the others seem more real and human than Siri does. To me, this statement shows that Siri knows that there is more to being human than what he has, that he is missing some important element. Humans are flawed and the most important flaw is that they are unreliable.
In the end, his entire ending monologue seems to say that Siri cannot provide any answers to any of the questions the novel so carefully brought up. This sentence seems to sum up the point that the nature of humans is not clear and Siri is a perfect representation of that fact.