UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

By Bonnie Stanard

When I was in college I wrote a story in which a girl talked to the reader about her life in a vague and unexceptional manner. In the end, she saw a rat and scurried after it, intending to eat it, at which point the reader realizes the narrator is insane—my attempt at an unreliable narrator.

To get a better idea about the unreliable narrator, I looked it up in dictionaries.

1. A character whose story cannot be taken at face value.

2. A narrator who holds a distorted view which leads to an inaccurate telling of events.

3. A character who cannot be trusted, either from ignorance or self-interest.

First of all, a reminder that the narrator is the character who tells the story. An unreliable narrator, then, tells lies. (I was going to add partial lies, but I don’t believe in partial lies.) Oh, you say, that sounds simple enough. But wait. Who reads a paragraph in a novel, stops, and wonders: “this says it is raining, but I wonder if it really is raining”? Our assumption is that the character telling the story is laying it on the line, giving us the facts (and only the facts, even if it’s fiction) and usually they are.

Since it is the narrator experiencing the action who gives us a false interpretation of the events, the obvious choice of point of view (POV) is either first person or third person limited.

GIRL ON THE TRAIN

I always become suspicious of a story (or movie) that features a character who has lapses of consciousness for reasons such as fainting spells, memory loss, drug or alcohol abuse. These are easy tropes for establishing an unreliable narrator.

SHUTTER ISLAND

The narrator that is insane, deluded or impaired may give you a distorted picture. If you figure that out on the first page, the author is an amateur. A good writer will string you along for pages until you figure out that you’re reading a story told by a deluded or crazy person (the most extreme of unreliable).

ATONEMENT

In more subtle instances, a rational narrator puts forward a view that is corrupted by bias, hatred, or naïveté. You, as the reader, will only be able to pick up on this by comparing the given narration with other verifiable evidence, whether it be from other characters or reality itself.

The purpose of an unreliable narrator is to deceive the reader about a story’s actual facts. Given that our stories are fiction to begin with, this makes for a fiction within a fiction. The more shrewd the deception and the more mystifying the story, the more gratifying for us when we figure it out.

If that isn’t confusing enough, here’s a conundrum for you. One www source lists as an unreliable narrator Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye). Because, says the source, Holden calls himself “the most terrific liar you ever saw.” When events prove he is honest in telling us he is untrustworthy, is he reliable or unreliable?