Continued Thoughts on Narration during "The Rise of the Novel"

On this journey of piecing together understandings about how the "novel" came to be, I am becoming more and more interested in how the way of transmitting a story is evolving at this time period, and how it has changed to what we recognize as an acceptable "novel" today. Having now read some of Fielding's work, I am even more interested in the awareness authors of this time have of themselves, this new genre, and the gravity of having a first-person narrator tell a story.
The term "unreliable narrator" is used when, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the person telling the story cannot be trusted or who's point-of-view is compromised. This phenomenon may occur for dozens of reasons, Poe often has his stories told from insane, jealous, or vengeful narrators, Lolita is told by a pedophile, and The Sound and the Fury's most reliable narrator is arguably a mentally challenged man-child. But in all of these stories, we can tell that the author employs these narrators as unreliable to achieve a specific response for their readers. Yet, I believe, as my last blog suggests, that the nature of telling a story from a first-person for Defoe and Richardson create unreliable narrators because of their hyper-awareness of a reader response to this new genre. As I was pointing out last week, Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Pamela must somehow tell their stories, while also justifying that the words are written down, not by an author but by the title character, creates an unreliable narrator because the story is inevitably told after it has happened. Richardson actually achieves the most accurate possible type of narration under these circumstances by having the story told in increments immediately after the action has taken place, rather than years later. But even in this clever form, the narrator can never overcome the form and create a believable story.
Henry Fielding, in Shamela, humorously shows just how unreliable a narrator Pamela was, partly because of the form of writing that Richardson employs. He points out that in order to get closer to the action of the story, interestingly in this truer version of events, Shamela writies in a tense that does not reflect her writing situation. "Odsbobs! I hear him coming in at the door. You see I write in the present Tense as Parson Williams, says." Throughout this entire story, Fielding shows the humour and unreliability of the genre of novel, or form of first-person narrator in that genre. And yet, Fielding's perceptiveness of form does not absolve him of his own hyper-awareness of writing and desire to show people how to read his work in this new genre. He spends the entire preface of his major work Joseph Andrews distilling the differences between comedy and burlesque, defending its validity with antiquity, and explaining what people should and should not find funny. The emergence of this form of writing is so clear in the writing itself. Once the reader and writer were able to accept that a story could be told by a character, without having to justify the words being printed on a page, more or less reliable narrators could be created by the author's design rather than by the genre's design.