Brian C. Poole, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Brian C. Poole
The Unreliable Narrator 9/9/2014 8:52:49 AM
[A version of this post originally appeared on thunderalleybcp.com on August 8, 2014]
The Unreliable Narrator is a tricky literary device to pull off. I’ve been thinking about it as I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which is a first rate and creative example.
Without giving much away, Girl is structured as alternating chapters from two narrators, the halves of a married couple. As the book has gone on, the two accounts of the couple’s marriage have diverged significantly. Flynn has given readers excellent reasons to question each narrator’s trustworthiness. It’s a great way to build suspense and I’m looking forward to seeing how she resolves this dichotomy.
When you speak of an Unreliable Narrator, it’s something far more than just withholding information. Books of all genres do that regularly, often so that readers will discover certain facts as the characters do. That’s a basic of narrative structure.
The Unreliable Narrator is most effectively deployed in fiction told in the first person. As a default, readers are conditioned to believe the information a book’s narrator is imparting. With first person narration, however, the narrator’s subjectivity is introduced into the mix. A reader doesn’t have a disinterested, all-seeing guide through the story. Instead, you have a character relating his or her personal experience of the plot. The narrator can inject his own biases and motives into how and when information is parceled out. Things the Unreliable Narrator tells you earlier often prove to be either false or at least not fully true.
I think the most classic version of the Unreliable Narrator is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was an unusual structure for Christie, who tended to tell her Hercule Poirot tales in the third person. Deploying a special first person narrator and then using the narrator to, effectively, gull the reader into ignoring some crucial evidence was a bold and highly successful gambit for Christie. She played on both audience’s experience with prior third-person Poirot tales (where the omniscient narrator might clue readers into potential lies via Poirot’s reactions) and their expectations of Christie herself as a writer.
A very subtle example of the Unreliable Narrator is Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey inobtrusively drops a key piece of dialogue from the narrator within the first few pages. It’s easy to overlook a very simple statement, once you get caught up in the stories of the various mental hospital inmates that populate Nest. But after what could be seen as a triumphant finale, if the reader returns to that early passage (as my English teacher had us do senior year in high school), it casts the bulk of the novel in a startlingly different light.
The Unreliable Narrator isn’t the sole province of novels. Movies and television shows can incorporate the device, sometimes very effectively. Memento is a good example. In that movie, the lead character is unreliable because a brain injury left him with a special kind of amnesia that prevented him from forming new memories. By telling the story backward, the film exploited the narrator’s condition to create suspense and surprise viewers with the unexpected ways the protagonist got to where we find him at the movie’s outset.
The Emmy-winning Homeland has also used the Unreliable Narrator gambit more than once. In the first season, CIA analyst Carrie believes that a returning solider might be a traitor. But viewers knew that Carrie lived through a traumatic experience in the field and then quickly learned she was bi-polar, drinking heavily and playing some reckless games with her medication. It provided an effective source of tension: was Carrie right or was she crazy (or possibly both)? The show revisited Carrie’s mental illness in a controversial third season twist that saw her spend time in a psychiatric hospital. It was an effective “gotcha” moment, but one that infuriated a lot of viewers.
When used well, the Unreliable Narrator can be an effective device to build suspense and create narrative surprise. Readers will buy into it if it’s well-foundationed, but could turn rather vicious if they feel they’ve been cheated.
