Greetings writers! SensibleShoes is chasing grebes across the snowy Northwest while being pursued by transom alligators, and/or practicing her Nobel speech for the new Jinx book, so I'm guest hosting tonight.
The unreliable narrator is a favorite technique of mine, because it contains an implied compliment: it assumes the reader can figure out what’s going on, without having it explicitly spelled out. SensibleShoes has pointed out that all narrators are unreliable,or at least imperfect in their reliability (except me, obviously). But as a literary technique, "unreliable narrator" refers to a narrator who tells the reader one thing, while simultaneously giving enough clues to show that something different is actually happening.
Narrators can be unreliable for several reasons. Huckleberry Finn is naïve – or, as we say around here, callow. Throughout his journey with the escaped slave Jim, Huck is racked with guilt for the sin of helping “steal” Jim from his supposedly rightful owner. Huck’s guilt is compounded when Jim talks of rescuing his wife and children, who were sold away from him. Toward the end of the book, Huck makes the most important moral choice of his life, deciding not to send a letter he’s just written that would reveal Jim’s whereabouts to his owner:
I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself : "All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
Twain trusts us to figure out what the real sin would be here.
Another example of the naïve narrator is five-year-old Jack in Emma Donaghue’s Room. Jack’s entire life has been spent in a locked shed with his mother, who is being held prisoner by a sociopath. Jack’s description of their everyday activities includes Ma blinking a light next to the skylight at night to “help her sleep,” and the two of them “exercising their lungs” by screaming in unison (but only on weekdays, when the captor is presumably at work). Jack doesn’t understand that these are Ma’s attempts at getting rescued, but he gives enough information to make it clear to the reader.
Some unreliable narrators are out of touch with reality. Edgar Allen Poe’s The Telltale Heart famously begins:
TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
By the next paragraph, the narrator’s madness is made clear:
He had the eye of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is narrated by the Chief, a mental patient whose narration seems straightforward at first, then throws in items like the machine filling the hallways with fog.
A narrator may be unreliable because he’s lying to himself. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens (the world’s most emotionally repressed butler) cannot admit to his love for Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. There’s a scene where Miss Kenton informs Stevens that she’s accepted another man’s marriage proposal, and she seems miffed that his only response is to congratulate her. She goes into her room, and Stevens recalls that that he stood outside her room with the “feeling” that she was crying. Stevens claims not to know why he would think such a thing, but the reader has had many hints by now that Miss Kenton loves Stevens, that she knows he loves her, and this was her last chance at getting him to act on it.
Finally, an unreliable narrator may be consciously lying to the reader. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has been called the story of an adolescent seductress, and that’s certainly what uber-creepy narrator Humbert Humbert overtly describes. But what he tells us between the lines is something different. This section involves an extremely grim chapter about child sexual abuse, so feel free to skip the next blockquote.
I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals. If her share in the ardors she kindled had never amounted to much, neither had pure lucre ever come to the fore. I was weak, I was not wise, my school-girl nymphet had me in thrall. With the human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only increased; and of this she took advantage.
[snip]
Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies-or three nickels-per day; and she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more that a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force.
It’s easy to get caught up in Humbert’s aggrieved tone, as he repeatedly claims to be the victim of this “cruel negotiator” who demanded money in exchange for the sex acts that poor, suffering Humbert couldn’t live without. He was “weak,” she “had him in thrall,” she “took advantage.”
Yet buried beneath his attempts at justification, Humbert gives all the information the reader needs: he was forcing a child to perform oral sex on him on a regular basis, she didn’t want to do it, and he gave up on physical force only because it didn’t get the results he wanted. He goes on to admit that he knew she was saving up the money to run away, and that he searched her room and stole the money back in order to keep her from escaping.
The exercise:
Write a short first-person scene where the narrator is telling us one thing, while showing us something very different. You can use your own story, or one of these scenarios:
A callow youth believes that s/he is about to save the kingdom with the Jewel of Togwogmagog, oblivious to a lurking danger.
Belinda believes she’s found True Love with Lord Postlethwaite-Praxleigh (pronounced Puppy), unaware that he’s two-timing her with Adelaide.
Private Detective Celia Spunk fingers the wrong person as the Chainsmoke Killer.
International Superspy James Buns takes credit for saving the world, when the real heroics were committed by his unfortunately-named girlfriend.
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