Do you dare use an unreliable narrator in your novel? by Jason Black
[caption id="attachment_3470" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Are you kidding me?"]
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First, what does “unreliable narrator” mean? Unreliable narrator is a literary technique in which the novel uses the narrator’s voice to lie to the reader early, on in order to create a powerful revelation later. Most novels hoodwink their readers in one way or another so as to create subsequent surprises. It’s not the trickery which is the key; it’s the use of the narrator’s voice to do it which makes for a true unreliable narrator.
As with any kind of lying--but please don’t construe this as advice for living your life generally--there are some guidelines you have to follow to make it work. A good lie, if you will, is one in which readers are pleased to find out they were wrong. A bad lie is one that makes us angry when we discover it. It’s the difference between saying “Honey, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to work late tonight,” because you’re actually coming home early to set up a surprise party, and saying it because you’re actually skipping off to a by-the-hour motel with that hot new co-worker from your office.
If you’re going to lie to your reader, I strongly encourage you to ask yourself: are you planning a surprise party for the reader, or are you having an affair with the truth behind the reader’s back?
A lot of this article focuses on ways unreliable narrator goes wrong, because unfortunately, there are a lot more ways to screw it up than to make it work. The single most important factor in whether it might work is the novel’s point of view and overall narrative style. This is because the novel’s overall narrative style is what sets readers’ expectations for how much credibility they will give to the information the narrative presents.
I’ll just say it. It’s almost impossible to pull off an unreliable narrator in third person omniscient point of view. In 3rd omni, the reader implicitly understands that the narrator is the author. And the author is supposed to be truly omniscient with respect to the world of the novel. Those are just the rules. The author, by definition, should know with perfect accuracy absolutely everything that needs to be known about the story. And when the author is the narrator, readers are well within their rights to assume that the narrative is giving them correct information.
If you were to count the facts in a typical novel, you would probably find a few thousand that are explicitly present on the page, and probably several tens of thousands more in the inferences readers can reasonably draw from those explicit facts. If all that information is correct, except for one sneaky thing you’ve lied about in order to surprise us later, readers will be equally within their rights to throw your book out the window. That is, you can’t mention in the beginning that the serving wench comes from a long line of serving wenches, her mother and her mother’s mother before her, but then in the end reveal--surprise!--the serving wench is really the long lost princess. That’s cheating.
The worst type of unreliable narrator is the author, but this is exactly what you get if you try to do unreliable narrator from third person omniscient POV. As readers, we need to be able to trust what we see directly in the narrative and what we may logically infer from that. Otherwise, what’s the whole point of reading the story, right? If it turns out we can’t do that, we’ve caught you in having an affair with the truth. You’ve misled us, only to shout “psych!” at us in the end.
Ok, so the author can’t get away with lying to the reader. Fair enough. Then who can? Just the book’s characters. They’re all that’s left.
Third person limited (a.k.a. “close third person”) POV is a little better. Still tough, but better. In this POV, the entire narrative is focused through the experiences of one character. The narrative doesn’t present anything that the POV character doesn’t directly experience. If the character doesn’t see it, we don’t see it. In this style, it is easier to pull off an unreliable narrator simply because it is easier to hide information or present misinformation to the reader. The consequence of doing so is that you must also hide or lie to the POV character in exactly the same way, but at least it becomes possible. In this, the situation with third person limited narrators is actually much closer to first person than it is to third omni.
In modern fiction, the opportunity to be a true narrator and a character simultaneously is usually limited to first person narrators: a character directly relating the story. Sounds straightforward, but it comes in a few different flavors. These flavors don’t have official writing-world monikers that I know of so I’ll make up some new ones.
This is the style in which the reader is placed inside the narrator’s head, but the narrator does not explicitly recognize the presence of the reader. The reader essentially eavesdrops on the narrator’s thoughts, observations, and feelings.
It’s tricky to pull off unreliable narrator in this style, because we assume the narrator believes he or she still has the privacy of his or her thoughts when in fact this isn’t the case. Shades of “but, if she knows we know she knows, then...” Yeah. The point is, if the narrator believes her own inner privacy remains intact, she has no particular reason to lie about anything. Within the privacy of our own minds, we’re free to admit or think about anything we want, without any fear of how people might judge us. The narrator may be wrong about some things. That’s fine. But the narrator shouldn’t outright lie to the reader, because the narrator isn’t supposed to know that the reader even exists. Being honestly wrong isn’t the same as lying.
When can unreliable narrator work in “first person eavesdropping” POV? In the narrow circumstance of the narrator is lying to herself. Because sometimes we do that, right? We lie to ourselves. We convince ourselves that such-and-such wasn’t really our fault. Or that maybe we shouldn’t have said that, but so-and-so shouldn’t have been so offended by it. Whatever. People do lie to themselves, and that can include first person narrators. The trick is in presenting the lie such that the reader could see that it was a lie, but doesn’t. The trick is in getting us to buy into the lie right along with the narrator.
It can also work when the narrator is mentally impaired. For example, a narrator who is crazy--whose grasp of reality is weak--can lie to the reader simply by being wrong about a great many things and building up some wholly other self-consistent rationalization to explain the world in terms of those misbeliefs. This is a slightly different application of unreliable narrator, though, because in most cases it will be obvious to the reader that the narrator is crazy. Readers will know right off that the narrator’s interpretation can’t be right, and will spend much of the novel trying to figure out what is right. We know we’re being lied to; the trick is to keep us from guessing too soon what the true situation is.
The other kind of first person narrator is one who does explicitly recognize the presence of the reader. This is when the narrator talks directly to the reader from time to time. We read with the understanding that we are essentially walking side-by-side through the story along with the narrator, while he explains what’s going on. This is probably the easiest style in which to write an unreliable narrator. When the narrator recognizes us as someone distinct from himself, we implicitly understand that he may not be telling us the whole truth.
The narrator may be carefully omitting certain embarrassing facts. The narrator may be giving us facts, but spun in whatever way he thinks will give us the impression he wants us to have. And yes, the narrator may at times outright lie to us. In this style, when the narrator talks directly to us, we immediately understand that all these things are possible. The trick in this style is for your narrator to be such an adept liar that we don’t see through the lies until the moment when the truth has the greatest dramatic impact.
Because that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it? Creating a moment of supreme dramatic impact for the reader. Whatever narrative POV you choose for your unreliable narrator, the whole point of the technique is that it is another tool you can use to surprise the reader. It’s a way to create a powerful reversal, one that undoes our understanding of all that has come before, while simultaneously replacing it with something even better. It's the literary equivalent of those unforgettable moments at the end of The Crying Game or The Usual Suspects (you know the ones I mean), in which the thing we thought was true, the thing on which the whole story rests, turns out not to be.
Any tool which can help you do that is, in my view, worth knowing about. But like I said, there are more ways for unreliable narrator to go horribly, horribly wrong than there are for it to go right. Knowing when to pull this tool out of your toolbox is half the battle.
[/caption]First, what does “unreliable narrator” mean? Unreliable narrator is a literary technique in which the novel uses the narrator’s voice to lie to the reader early, on in order to create a powerful revelation later. Most novels hoodwink their readers in one way or another so as to create subsequent surprises. It’s not the trickery which is the key; it’s the use of the narrator’s voice to do it which makes for a true unreliable narrator.
As with any kind of lying--but please don’t construe this as advice for living your life generally--there are some guidelines you have to follow to make it work. A good lie, if you will, is one in which readers are pleased to find out they were wrong. A bad lie is one that makes us angry when we discover it. It’s the difference between saying “Honey, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to work late tonight,” because you’re actually coming home early to set up a surprise party, and saying it because you’re actually skipping off to a by-the-hour motel with that hot new co-worker from your office.
If you’re going to lie to your reader, I strongly encourage you to ask yourself: are you planning a surprise party for the reader, or are you having an affair with the truth behind the reader’s back?
A lot of this article focuses on ways unreliable narrator goes wrong, because unfortunately, there are a lot more ways to screw it up than to make it work. The single most important factor in whether it might work is the novel’s point of view and overall narrative style. This is because the novel’s overall narrative style is what sets readers’ expectations for how much credibility they will give to the information the narrative presents.
Third person omniscient narrators
I’ll just say it. It’s almost impossible to pull off an unreliable narrator in third person omniscient point of view. In 3rd omni, the reader implicitly understands that the narrator is the author. And the author is supposed to be truly omniscient with respect to the world of the novel. Those are just the rules. The author, by definition, should know with perfect accuracy absolutely everything that needs to be known about the story. And when the author is the narrator, readers are well within their rights to assume that the narrative is giving them correct information.
If you were to count the facts in a typical novel, you would probably find a few thousand that are explicitly present on the page, and probably several tens of thousands more in the inferences readers can reasonably draw from those explicit facts. If all that information is correct, except for one sneaky thing you’ve lied about in order to surprise us later, readers will be equally within their rights to throw your book out the window. That is, you can’t mention in the beginning that the serving wench comes from a long line of serving wenches, her mother and her mother’s mother before her, but then in the end reveal--surprise!--the serving wench is really the long lost princess. That’s cheating.
The worst type of unreliable narrator is the author, but this is exactly what you get if you try to do unreliable narrator from third person omniscient POV. As readers, we need to be able to trust what we see directly in the narrative and what we may logically infer from that. Otherwise, what’s the whole point of reading the story, right? If it turns out we can’t do that, we’ve caught you in having an affair with the truth. You’ve misled us, only to shout “psych!” at us in the end.
Ok, so the author can’t get away with lying to the reader. Fair enough. Then who can? Just the book’s characters. They’re all that’s left.
Third person limited narrators
Third person limited (a.k.a. “close third person”) POV is a little better. Still tough, but better. In this POV, the entire narrative is focused through the experiences of one character. The narrative doesn’t present anything that the POV character doesn’t directly experience. If the character doesn’t see it, we don’t see it. In this style, it is easier to pull off an unreliable narrator simply because it is easier to hide information or present misinformation to the reader. The consequence of doing so is that you must also hide or lie to the POV character in exactly the same way, but at least it becomes possible. In this, the situation with third person limited narrators is actually much closer to first person than it is to third omni.
First person narrators
In modern fiction, the opportunity to be a true narrator and a character simultaneously is usually limited to first person narrators: a character directly relating the story. Sounds straightforward, but it comes in a few different flavors. These flavors don’t have official writing-world monikers that I know of so I’ll make up some new ones.
“First person eavesdropper”
This is the style in which the reader is placed inside the narrator’s head, but the narrator does not explicitly recognize the presence of the reader. The reader essentially eavesdrops on the narrator’s thoughts, observations, and feelings.
It’s tricky to pull off unreliable narrator in this style, because we assume the narrator believes he or she still has the privacy of his or her thoughts when in fact this isn’t the case. Shades of “but, if she knows we know she knows, then...” Yeah. The point is, if the narrator believes her own inner privacy remains intact, she has no particular reason to lie about anything. Within the privacy of our own minds, we’re free to admit or think about anything we want, without any fear of how people might judge us. The narrator may be wrong about some things. That’s fine. But the narrator shouldn’t outright lie to the reader, because the narrator isn’t supposed to know that the reader even exists. Being honestly wrong isn’t the same as lying.
When can unreliable narrator work in “first person eavesdropping” POV? In the narrow circumstance of the narrator is lying to herself. Because sometimes we do that, right? We lie to ourselves. We convince ourselves that such-and-such wasn’t really our fault. Or that maybe we shouldn’t have said that, but so-and-so shouldn’t have been so offended by it. Whatever. People do lie to themselves, and that can include first person narrators. The trick is in presenting the lie such that the reader could see that it was a lie, but doesn’t. The trick is in getting us to buy into the lie right along with the narrator.
It can also work when the narrator is mentally impaired. For example, a narrator who is crazy--whose grasp of reality is weak--can lie to the reader simply by being wrong about a great many things and building up some wholly other self-consistent rationalization to explain the world in terms of those misbeliefs. This is a slightly different application of unreliable narrator, though, because in most cases it will be obvious to the reader that the narrator is crazy. Readers will know right off that the narrator’s interpretation can’t be right, and will spend much of the novel trying to figure out what is right. We know we’re being lied to; the trick is to keep us from guessing too soon what the true situation is.
“First person companion”
The other kind of first person narrator is one who does explicitly recognize the presence of the reader. This is when the narrator talks directly to the reader from time to time. We read with the understanding that we are essentially walking side-by-side through the story along with the narrator, while he explains what’s going on. This is probably the easiest style in which to write an unreliable narrator. When the narrator recognizes us as someone distinct from himself, we implicitly understand that he may not be telling us the whole truth.
The narrator may be carefully omitting certain embarrassing facts. The narrator may be giving us facts, but spun in whatever way he thinks will give us the impression he wants us to have. And yes, the narrator may at times outright lie to us. In this style, when the narrator talks directly to us, we immediately understand that all these things are possible. The trick in this style is for your narrator to be such an adept liar that we don’t see through the lies until the moment when the truth has the greatest dramatic impact.
The moment of greatest impact
Because that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it? Creating a moment of supreme dramatic impact for the reader. Whatever narrative POV you choose for your unreliable narrator, the whole point of the technique is that it is another tool you can use to surprise the reader. It’s a way to create a powerful reversal, one that undoes our understanding of all that has come before, while simultaneously replacing it with something even better. It's the literary equivalent of those unforgettable moments at the end of The Crying Game or The Usual Suspects (you know the ones I mean), in which the thing we thought was true, the thing on which the whole story rests, turns out not to be.
Any tool which can help you do that is, in my view, worth knowing about. But like I said, there are more ways for unreliable narrator to go horribly, horribly wrong than there are for it to go right. Knowing when to pull this tool out of your toolbox is half the battle.