THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

By Kasie Whitener

Christine doesn’t remember anything. I’ve just started a new book by a favorite author and the opening chapter is told from the point of view of an amnesia victim. What an incredible lens through which to bring a story.

Without remembering anything, Christine can’t tell us where she is, who she is, or what brought her into these circumstances. She doesn’t know the people who enter the room despite them knowing her. She is relying solely upon what she sees and feels right now. Unclouded by exposition, this narrator is confused and, as a reader, I am too. Moreover, I’m curious.

The unreliable narrator is a first-person account that can’t be trusted. So often we take for granted that the narrator’s point of view is absolute: it’s how the story really unfolded. But the unreliable narrator makes us question if what we’re seeing is true or just her perception.

Faulkner used an unreliable narrator in The Sound and the Fury. Nick Carraway qualifies as an unreliable narrator in The Great Gatsby. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger both build empathy for their narrator before starting to hint there’s something unstable and untrustworthy about them.

Arguably all first-person narrators are unreliable. Anytime we are seeing things only from a single character’s point of view, we are subject to the lens through which that person sees the world. Experience, values, and ambition all cloud a character’s perception and the first-person narrator is an extremely limiting view point because we only get the other characters through the first-person.

Nick Carraway doesn’t know what Gatsby wants or how he feels, he can only report what he sees and make inferences based on Gatsby’s actions. We think Carraway is reasonable, but with all those parties, he may have been drunk more often than not. In The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins makes one of the narrators an alcoholic. Intentionally casting doubt on what that narrator thinks she saw.

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson also deals with an amnesia-suffering narrator. The fragments of memory captured in the woman’s journal reveal, slowly, the terrible circumstances in which she finds herself. It’s a compelling thriller made all the more dramatic because for most of the book the reader is as confused as the narrator.

Some dangers to the unreliable narrator are reader confusion and the writer must decide how much confusion she thinks the reader will tolerate before putting the book down. Admittedly, The Girl on the Train had to rely upon a cast of narrators to offset the drunk woman, but it also seemed to turn those other seemingly trustworthy people into unreliables over the course of the novel, too.

Most importantly, the unreliable narrator is both realistic (we are all unreliable because we see things only from our own perspective) and limiting in a way that might frustrate not just the reader, but also the author. But it’s so totally worth it.