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Unreliable narrator

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Illustration by Gustave Doré forBaron Münchhausen: tall tales, such as those of the Baron, often feature unreliable narrators.

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction^[1]) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.

The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his unreliability. A more common, and dramatic, use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist endingforces the reader to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In many cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.

The literary device of the unreliable narrator should not be confused with other devices such aseuphemism, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, personification, sarcasm, or satire; it may, however, coexist with such devices, as in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a satire^[2] whose narrator is unreliable (and thus not credible). Similarly, historical novels, speculative fiction, and clearly delineateddream sequences are generally not considered instances of unreliable narration, even though they describe events that did not or could not happen.

Some works suggest that all narrators are inherently unreliable due to self-interest, personal bias, or selective memory; "reliable narrators" would be "unreliable narrators without hints or clues of their very own unreliability".

Contents  [hide] 1 Examples of unreliable narrators 1.1 Novels 1.2 Films 1.3 Music 1.4 Television 2 Works featuring unreliable narrators 3 References

[edit]Examples of unreliable narrators

[edit]Novels

One of the earliest known examples of unreliable narration is Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In the Merchant's Tale for example, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, allows his misogynistic bias to slant much of his tale, and in the Wife of Bath's, the Wife often misquotes and misremembers quotations and stories.

Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience can impair their judgment and make them unreliable. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; even going so far as to accuse his author, "Mr. Mark Twain," of having stretched the truth in the previous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an early example of a fourth-wall breach. In contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.

Henry James' classic novella The Turn of the Screw, in which a young woman experiences ghostly hauntings summoned by supernaturally-powered children, can be interpreted as a novel of unreliable narration, but whether or not the narrator is actually delusional is (perhaps intentionally) ambiguous. It is of note that the story was not interpreted thus until several decades after its original publication.^[3]

The first part of William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury is, literally, "a tale told by an idiot." The other parts are told by other, damaged but perhaps more reliable narrators.

In the novel Zeno's Conscience (La coscienza di Zeno, 1923) by the Italian writer Italo Svevo, Zeno, the first-person narrator, continuously tryies to justify his failures, often telling lies or, more often, avoiding important details and providing excuses to the reader and to himself. Moreover, since under the effect of psychoanalysis, Zeno's point of view on the past events is always changing and never definite.

Another class of unreliable narrator is one who intentionally attempts to deceive the audience or other characters in the story. One of the earliest examples is Agatha Christie's detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the narrator is scrupulously honest in facts revealed but neglects to mention certain key events. His unreliability is noted in Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas, in which Odd, the narrator, is also unreliable: he admits the nature of his unreliability at the beginning of the book, but the exact meaning of that admission is not made clear until the book's end.

In some cases, as with Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 Pale Fire, the reader is unable to discern among several possible narrators, each with his or her own intrinsically unreliable agenda and bias. This serves to effectively include the reader in the experience of the novel, rather than simply providing a narrative, encouraging independent theories and ultimately furthering a point.

Gene Wolfe could be said to have made the unreliable narrator one of his stylistic signatures. The most famous example is the complicated and self-contradictory autobiography of the Autarch Severian, who claims to possess eidetic memory, in The Book of the New Sun. Narrators in others of Wolfe's books include a soldier who loses his entire memory every morning (Soldier of the Mist) and a combination of multiple personalities sharing one body (Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun).

Randy Mulray, the main character in C.W. Schultz’s Yeval, easily qualifies as an unreliable narrator. The reader grows to know that Mulray is a very self-conscious man with a low self-esteem, which in turn makes him obviously overplay (or underplay) situations that he describes to the reader. Because he is a drug-dealer and envisions thoughts of a serial killer, there are several hints throughout the novel that Mulray could be hallucinating some of what he tells.

The eponymous narrator of Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet is thoroughly and entertainingly duplicitous.

Ken Kesey's two most famous novels feature unreliable narrators. "Chief" Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest suffers from schizophrenia, and his telling of the events often includes things such as people growing or shrinking, walls oozing with slime, or the orderlies kidnapping and "curing" Santa Claus. Narration in Sometimes a Great Notion switches between several of the main characters, whose bias tends to switch the reader's sympathies from one person to another, especially in the rivalry between Leland and Hank. Many of Susan Howatch's novels similarly uses this technique; each chapter is narrated by a different character, and only after reading chapters by each of the narrators does the reader realize each of the narrators has biases and "blind spots" that cause them to perceive shared experiences differently.

Charlie Gordon, the narrator in Daniel Keyes's epistolary novel, Flowers for Algernon is mentally retarded at the start of the novel but develops greater intelligence and understanding. Following a Rorschach inkblot test early in the novel, Charlie reports that he was told to imagine pictures in the ink contrary to the standardised way of delivering the test. Subsequently, on listening to an audio recording of the test, he realises that his memory was flawed.

In some instances, unreliable narration can bring about the fantastic in works of fiction. In Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, for example, the unreliability of the narrator Maurice Allington destabilizes the boundaries between reality and the fantastic. The same applies to Nigel Williams's Witchcraft.^[4]

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has often come under fire^{[citation needed]} for being presented by an unreliable narrator. We are being told the story by a sea captain who has heard the story from a dying Victor Frankenstein. It is posited that Victor's pride could have affected the version of the story he tells the sea captain. And further still, the sea captain could be embellishing the story to impress whomever he is telling the story to.

[edit]Films

A more recent example of intentional deception is the film The Usual Suspects, where the narrator is a man being interrogated by the police. He offers a detailed account of the events leading up to a recent crime, but avoids sharing everything he knows about the mysterious crime lord Keyser Söze. The 1945 film noir classic Detour is told from the perspective of an unreliable protagonist who is trying to justify his actions.^[5][6][7] Another recent example is the movie Lucky Number Slevin in which the main character, Slevin Kelevra, claims to be an innocent bystander caught in a case of mistaken identity. This claim is supported by a number of flashbacks, however, many of these flashbacks prove to be fabricated with Kelevra pulling the strings.

Mentally impaired narrators may describe the world as they perceive it rather than as it really is. In the film, Bubba Ho-tep, the main character is either Elvis Presley or an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff. He appears to suffer from Alzheimer's disease, making it unclear how much of his story is real. In the film Memento, the narrator is a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia. He is unable to form new long-term memories, and is thus unable to provide reliable narration about crucial past events or even his own motivations.

The film Rashomon uses multiple narrators to tell the story of the death of a samurai. Each of the witnesses describe the same basic events but differ wildly in the details, alternately claiming that the samurai was killed by accident, suicide, or murder. The term Rashomon effect is used to describe how different witnesses are able to produce differing, yet plausible, accounts of the same event, with equal sincerity. This kind of unreliable narration has also been used for comic effect in movies such as He Said, She Said and Grease, where the two romantic leads offer very different accounts of their relationship.