The unrelaible narrator - in At Night We Walk in Circles

Spoilers, re the last section of Daniel Alarcon's At Night We Walk in Circles, which, as expected, brings us at last to Collectors prison, where the narrator and the now-incarcerated main character, Nelson, meet at last - this the most extensively first-person narrative section of the novel, as the narrator describes his life on entry into the capital city, he beginning work as a magazine journalist, his interest in the case of a young man charged with murder in a love-triangle crime of passion, and realizing that this young man, Nelson, is the actor he'd met briefly on a visit to his home town (and who'd entrusted him, oddly, with several diary notebooks). The narrator pursues the story, interviews friends and family (his work constitutes the entire body of this novel), and finally visits N. in prison: this is a great concluding scene, the scary walk through the hallways, lined with drug addicts, the "homeless" in prison, so overcrowded that the lowest-ranking sleep outdoors or in hallways; two tough guys follow them, Nelson says: they're here to protect you. The journalist-narrator begins to ask questions, and Nelson puts up a front, suggests that maybe he in fact did kill his rival, Mindo (couldn't remember his name in yesterday's post) - but can this be true? Maybe he's just saying it to protect the thug Jaime in case he tried to exact revenge inside the prison? In any case, Nelson warns the narrator against "stealing" his life, that is, writing his story, and the narrator leaves - of course he does write the story, that is, this novel, but what has he done or changed to protect Nelson, to make him look more innocent? This question gets at the heart of the issue of unreliable narration - not just in fiction, but also in daily life. How much of what we see and what we tell is colored or distorted by our needs, desires, fears? I don't want to push this argument all the way and suggest that all narration is unreliable, that there are no truths or true accounts, but it does make us think about everyone's having an "agenda," conscious or unconscious, personal or political, and to understand what anyone's telling us you have to search "not for the meaning but for the use" - the heart of the mystery of language.