For example, the narrator of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier initially misunderstands nearly everything she learns about her new husband’s dead wife, and therefore, the reader does as well. This narrator is unreliable due to having incomplete or incorrect information. There is sub type of narrator that differs from those listed above. A more modern example is Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi in which readers wonder increasingly about the truth of events described by the narrator. The classic 19th century tale The Yellow Wallpaper is one famous example of this type of narrator. The unreliable narrator is particularly useful for horror and supernatural fiction writers who want readers to question the line between fantasy and reality. These books rely on readers to make inferences based on clues given by narrators who do not always accurately interpret events. The young autistic narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon or the five-year-old narrator of Emma Donoghue’s Room are simply reporting the world as they understand it. Sometimes, a narrator is unreliable due to youth or naïveté. This type of narrator is not always deliberately deceptive. Often in books like these the reader starts out trusting the narrator and only as the story goes on realises that something is amiss. It can be difficult to discuss these types of narrators without spoiling the story, but both Agatha Christie’s classic novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the recent Gillian Flynn best seller Gone Girl employ unreliable narrators whose lack of trustworthiness is crucial to the construction of both novels’ mystery. Alex from A Clockwork Orange is another example of a reprehensible character sharing his unreliable narrative with the reader.ĭishonest narrators can also be used to great effect in stories of crime and mystery. In Lolita, Nabakov signals Humbert’s unreliability to the reader in a number of ways such as his outrageous claims, his endless justifications for shocking acts and his contempt for others. Perhaps one of the most famous is Vladimir Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man with a predilection for underaged girls or “nymphets” (as he calls them). A classic example is the murderous narrator of the Edgar Allan Poe story “The Telltale Heart”. In general, even people who commit the worst crimes justify their actions to themselves. In other words, some stories are told by narrators who are such terrible people that they cannot tell their stories objectively. Sometimes the narrator is unreliable by nature. The writer and the narrator in fiction are not the same person of course, so what does the writer stand to gain from using a misleading narrator to tell a story? What is the purpose of an untruthful narrator in fiction? And how can the writer ensure that the reader understands that the narrator is not to believed? In fact, prehistoric humans probably sat around fires knowingly listening to one hunter who always exaggerated his feats. The technique has been around as long as literature itself has been though. The phrase “unreliable narrator” was first used by the literary critic Wayne Booth in the early 1960s. This may be because the point of view character is insane, lying, deluded or for any number of other reasons. It is a character who tells the reader a story that cannot be taken at face value. His unreliability might be obvious to the reader throughout, it might be revealed gradually, or it might come as a revelation that provides a major plot twist. An unreliable narrator is one of the most powerful tools available to a writer.
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