“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer (post 3): Nameless first-person narrator knows many things he could not possibly know about the protagonist 

The first-person narrator, who is nameless until the end of the novel, knows innumerable things about what Arthur Less thinks and does that only Arthur Less, himself, could have known. Thus, the narrator is grossly implausible.

It is a mystery, then, why the novel was written this way. The key to the mystery may be the first-person narrator’s namelessness (for most of the novel).

In the author’s creative process, the narrative voice was probably a nameless alternate personality, since multiple personality is where you find both namelessness and imaginative stories. But editorial opinion may have considered a nameless narrator inappropriate for this type of novel. So another character was given the narrative credit, even though it didn’t make sense (because that character had no way of knowing all that he knew).

Why haven’t most readers objected to such an obviously implausible narrator?

They give the novel the benefit of the doubt, because it is otherwise so well written. Plus the character given credit for the narration is part of a happy ending. And love trumps logic.

Andrew Sean Greer. Less [2017]. New York, Back Bay Books, 2018.