Authorial Trust...can/should we?

I made it in, again, finally!!!

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I think the most important (and profound) statement in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children occurs on page 242:
‘I told you the truth […] Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.’
This passage, along with many others moments throughout, put us in a position of questioning the reliability of our narrator. On the one hand, we should trust the narrative because it is a truth—a memory’s truth, but a truth nonetheless. The narrator is not trying to deceive us, but rather positioning himself as being aware of the potential faults of memory, or story, or autobiography, or history.

On the other hand, the fact that it is ‘creat[ing] its own reality’ should raise caution flags. Lines like ‘Sometimes legends makes reality, and become more useful than the facts’ (47) and ‘because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe’ (310) tend to lead one onto a path of skepticism. The narrator leaves these types of moments, along with open admission of mistakes in his ‘history’ or ‘chronology’ of events, and in doing so the trust is shaken.

The question for me, then, becomes does it matter? As we read this narrative—whether as historical commentary, social criticism, fiction, autobiography, philosophy, allegory, and so on—is trust necessary to take away what one needs? More importantly, is the uncertainty of trust exactly what the narrator needs? If we trusted him completely, would we possibly expect less meandering and uncertainty in the writing? If we didn’t trust him, would we need more moments of ‘proof?’