Whither reliability, engagement?

While writing Craft essays 3 and 4, I kept going back to the idea of reliability. What makes a narrator reliable? Do we expect all our narrators to be reliable?

I get the sense that in the past, when people were supposedly more innocent (pre-Watergate, pre-World Wars, pre-technology, pre-JD Sallinger, pre-sex scandals), readers believed writers. Period. But somewhere along the way, human beings began getting suspicious of well, everything. And this affected reading too.

So the reader no longer trusts the narrator wholeheartedly. That kind of authorial trust has to be earned. The modern reader can smell a rat a mile away now, it seems. Locate your story too far back in your past? Unreliable. Tell the reader too much? Unreliable.

Yet is reliability really that important? Do we all want to read only reliable stories?
In a sense, reader reponse theory seems like a study on how humans would like to be treated, in a perfect world. We want people we can trust wholeheartedly, we want the narrator to feel like our best friend. We want to relate to the story.

Part of that need to feel somewhat connected to the story is how we want to place that story in our reality, to make it play by our schema, our rules. The group of us in Singapore who have been meeting monthly to workshop our stories often talk about how they don't feel such and such a character would do/say "something like that". Writers are people making sense of the world, and trying to recreate that world that they are still understanding in their stories, and when someone comes along and shows them a reading of the world that does not align to what they think, that sticks out, seems artificial.

The journal article I found for the 4th critical essay talked about engagement in a very flighty sort of way, referring to engaging the reader as a promise of commitment to the story, akin to an engagement to marry. In education, we talk about engagement all the time; the belief that engaged students (with the lesson, not to each other) would result in higher quality of learning. In class, it's active listening (taking down notes, participating in class discussions, asking questions). [Actually, this might just be the Western view. The Eastern view, apparently, is students simply keeping quiet and listening -- in Japanese lesson study, students' 'bright eyes' are what teachers look for.] In stories, would engagement require some form of multi-modality as well? The easy answer would be that the story needs to engage the reader's senses and have enough sight, sound, feel, etc., balancing setting and dialogue and action together.