Trope Talk: The Unreliable Narrator

The Unreliable Narrator

We all have that one person in our lives, maybe it’s a friend, maybe it’s a family member, who has a different memory of events than us.
You know that person. They get into an argument with someone at Disney World and by the time the rest of the family finds out what happened, it’s gone from a little spat to all out brawl? Maybe this person exaggerates a lot, maybe they’re a little biased about the story and forget certain details. Maybe they genuinely do not understand what is going on from an objective standpoint, for whatever reason.
Regardless of the reason, you’ve learned that whenever they tell a story to take with a grain of salt. If they say they stopped the train, they probably just talked to the conductor.
These are all examples of an unreliable narrator.
An unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator with a compromised viewpoint. What does that mean? It means the narrator of the story does not give an accurate depiction of what happens in the story. Think of it like a spectrum: You have the events that actually happen in the story, the facts, the impartial observations, people telling you things as they happen etc. Then on the other side you have the character’s version of what happened.
The most popular example of this is in The catcher in the rye. Holden Caulfield is an unreliable narrator.
Today we are going to look at the different types of unreliable narrators, why authors use it, and how you can use it in your own writing.
Spoilers for the following
Catcher in the rye
Usual Suspects
Fight Club
Beautiful Mind
How I Met Your Mother
I know when I first found out about an unreliable narrator, I had a lot of questions and I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that a writer would make their narrator say things that weren’t true. And then, you kind of go down a rabbit hole of isn’t everyone an unreliable narrator?
And the answer is “well… kind of?” If you use a first person narrative, you always run the risk of not giving the reader all the information because the person doesn’t know it all.
When you read a story in first person point of view, your general assumption is that you are being told the events as they happen and are given information that affirms what the character is telling us to be true.
Also, typically a reliable narrator will have points where they separate their own thoughts, reflections, and feelings about the situation from what is actually happening.
In Jane Eyre, she frequently tells the reader her inner thoughts and feelings about a situation. However, she tells us this after relaying the events to use.
Jane is a credible and realistic character, and because we are privy to her innermost thoughts, we generally take her to be a reliable observer.
The reader knows a first person narrator becomes unreliable because of specific signals the author shows in their writing.
It’s kind of like a mystery that way, but the red herring is what the narrator vs. what actually happened.
How do you know when the narrator is unreliable?
An unreliable narrator won’t necessarily tell you when they were lying to you and in some cases, they might not actually know.
Signals of unreliable narration: Whichever definition of unreliability one follows, there are a number of signs that constitute or at least hint at a narrator's unreliability.
Intratextual signs: the narrator contradicting himself, other characters contradicting them, having gaps in memory, or lying to other characters
An example of this is in the Usual Suspects where the narrator frequently changes his story.
Extratextual signs such as contradicting the reader's general world knowledge or impossibilities (within the parameters of logic)
In Catcher in the Rye, we are frequently shown that Holden’s narrative contradicts what is actually happening. In fact, in the beginning he says, ‘I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.’ How can we believe anything he says?
Reader's literary competence. This includes the reader's knowledge about literary types (e.g. stock characters that reappear over centuries), knowledge about literary genres and its conventions or stylistic devices
We see this frequently in stories like Huck Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird where we, as the reader with more life experience, have to do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to understanding what’s actually happening because the narrators are children.
There are a lot of different kinds of unreliable narrators. There are three basic types of unreliable narrators:
1) Deliberately Unreliable: These are the liars. Narrators who are aware of their deception. These are the people who actually lie to the reader and they know what they’re doing.
This type of narrator is intentionally lying to the reader because, well, they can. They have your attention, the point of view is theirs, and they’ll choose what to do with it, regardless of any “responsibility” they might have to the reader.
A quick note about this kind of narrator: people want to read about characters they can connect with or relate to. This is one of the tricky parts of writing this kind of narrator: the character has to be compelling enough that we’ll keep connecting with them even if we suspect we’re being misled. We don’t have to necessarily like them, but we need to understand them.
Think of these narrators like propaganda machines. They know exactly what they're doing and they’re trying to manipulate you into ignoring the truth, the facts, or any type of logic.
You could also think of them like Barney in How I met Your Mother where he has some crazy stories and about half of them aren’t true.
2) Evasively Unreliable: Narrators who unconsciously alter the truth
The motivations for this kind of narrator are often quite muddy — sometimes it’s simple self-preservation, other times it’s slightly more manipulative. Sometimes the narrator isn’t even aware they are twisting the truth until later in the book. Their unreliability often stems from the need to tell the story in a way that justifies something, and their stories are often embellished or watered down.
These kinds of contradictory characters whose mindsets aren’t clear can keep readers anxiously waiting for the narrator’s moment of clarity — drawing their own conclusions all the while.
An example of this is Ted Mosby in How I Met Your Mother. He frequently alters the truth when he’s telling the story to his children and makes everything sound romantic and sanitize what he thinks is inappropriate.
These are the people who end up in the r/that happened
3) Naively Unreliable: Narrators who are honest but lack all the information, so their conclusions based on what they observe are usually wrong.
Unlike the previous two types, this type of narrator is not unreliable on purpose — they simply lack a traditional, “greater understanding.” This kind of unreliability can allow the reader to view your story with fresh eyes.
The narrator’s “unorthodox” interpretations might only provide us with partial explanations of what’s going on, forcing us to dig a little deeper and connect the dots. These naive narrators can also encourage readers to take more significant notice of things we might’ve taken for granted.
Examples:
In Forrest Gump, Forest narrates his life story and his character is developed through misunderstandings that are clear to the audience, such as Apple Computer being a "fruit company". In the first ten minutes, he states that the father of his beloved Jenny treated her well, not understanding that the man's ongoing kissing and touching of her and her sisters was indicative of sexual abuse
The latter example is told at the beginning of the movie. Forrest is an unreliable narrator because he sees the world through innocent eyes. He takes things at face value
Why do people use unreliable narrators?
The short answer is it keeps the audience on their toes.
Think about it. How compelling is it to read a book to find out what actually happened?
If you notice the contradictions, it makes you more curious about what actually happened and why the narrator isn’t telling the truth.
It can make for a really good plot twist
The ending of the 1995 film The Usual Suspects reveals that the narrator had been deceiving another character – and hence the audience – by inventing the events and characters he is describing from whole cloth, and rather than being the weak, humble, and quiet criminal he presents as, is in fact Keyser Söze, the film's fabled crime boss.
In the 1999 film Fight Club, it is revealed that its protagonist the Narrator has dissociative identity disorder and that some events were fabricated, which means only one of the two main protagonists actually exists, as the other is in the Narrator's mind.
In the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, it is eventually revealed that the protagonist has paranoid schizophrenia, and many of the events he witnessed occurred only in his own mind.
It can create dramatic irony
Similarly in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is an unreliable narrator because he is a child and sees through innocent eyes, which causes him to misunderstand the implications of racism, revealing Twain's satire of the ironic casualty towards racism in the south.
Huck can be an unreliable narrator, and his naïve misreading of situations creates dramatic irony. He ends up in a lot of bad situations because he doesn’t understand that the characters he’s meeting are bad people or lying to him.
It can be used to show character development.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is an example of a somewhat unreliable narrator because she’s a child. At the beginning she’s six and at the end she’s 8.
The reader often has to do the work of interpretation to understand what characters are actually talking about, or judge the severity of a situation. At the same time, Scout’s innocence makes her more trustworthy as a narrator than an adult might be, in that she lacks the sophistication to shape her story or withhold information for her own benefit.
We have no reason to believe Scout is misinterpreting events, because her descriptions of the action are straightforward and largely visual. “Mr. Tate blinked and ran his hands through his hair,” “his legs were crossed and one arm was resting on the back of his chair.” The only indication of Scout’s inability to understand events is her faith that her father will win the trial.
It can highlight an innocent or child narrator to the cynicism and hypocrisy of adults.
How to write one
First you need to figure out what makes your narrator unreliable
Is it their age, like Scout and Huckleberry Finn?
Are they trying to manipulate you, like in Gone Girl?
Are they just a liar, like Holden Caulfield?
Is it a result of psychological issue like in Mr. Robot?
Are they trying to get away with or justify a crime, like in The Usual Suspects or Edgar Allen Poe’s A Tell Tale Heart?

List of examples: https://bookriot.com/2018/11/08/books-with-unreliable-narrators/

That’s all I got for you today! If you want more content like this, hit that like and subscribe button for more fabulous content! And, of course, happy writing

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Trope Talk: The Unreliable Narrator

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