Unreliable narrator

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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 ending forces 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 as euphemism, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, personification, sarcasm, or satire, in which the narrator is credible, but the narrator's words cannot be taken literally. Similarly, historical novels, speculative fiction, and clearly delineated dream sequences are generally not considered instances of unreliable narration, even though they describe events that did not or could not happen.

Contents

[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, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, allows his misogynistic bias to slant much of his tale.

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.

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.

In some cases, as with Vladimir Nabokov's 1969 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. Severian, the narrator in his Book of the New Sun, is cursed with a perfect memory. 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.

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

Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon has a narrator who could also be considered as unreliable - initially educationally subnormal, he has only a very limited understanding of events around him. His uplift (through treatment) to genius-level intelligence and subsequent inevitable reversion to retardation are revealed to the reader through his own limited perception of them.

[edit] Film

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.

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 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.

Some works suggest that all narrators are inherently unreliable due to self-interest, personal bias, or selective memory. 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, and 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.

Sometimes it is not a character in the story but the third-person narrator who deceives the audience by omitting certain events or presenting events in a misleading manner. Examples include the films Fallen and The Sixth Sense.

[edit] Song

An unreliable narrator may also appear in songs with a narrative. Eminem's persona of Slim Shady has resulted in many songs with unreliable narrators[2]. In one, "Stan," the unreliable narrator is actually an obsessed fan who grows increasingly erratic while thinking that Slim Shady is ignoring him; Shady is by contrast presented in the song as a reliable secondary narrator[3]. Another example of growing vehemence revealing the unreliable nature of a narrator is The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," in which the narrator tells of centuries of atrocities, going from charming to threatening, all the while refusing to disclose either his true identity or true intentions[4].

[edit] Television

The technique is also used less often on television. However, How I Met Your Mother often employs the technique, the narrator telling a story, only to find near the end of the episode that one crucial piece was missing, casting the episode in question in a different light. In the pilot, for example, it is revealed that the character the narrator falls in love with is not actually the titular "mother," as seemingly foreshadowed. In a second season episode, unreliable narrators tell one character of her boyfriend's wild night on the town, possibly culminating in a one-night stand. Only at the episode's end is it revealed that it was a mutual friend, using the boyfriend's identity, engaging in these pursuits.

The television show House has employed unreliable narration on occasion as well. In "Three Stories," Dr. House tells a class of medical students a self-contradictory story about three patients with ambiguous identities. Although he never states so to the class, it is eventually revealed that he is one of the patients. In "No Reason," it is the camera itself that is unreliable, as it is slowly revealed that the events portrayed might be House's hallucination rather than reality.[5]

More recently, the television show The Black Donnellys employed an unreliable narrator to tell its story.[6]

[edit] Works featuring unreliable narrators

Literature featuring unreliable narrators:

Films with an unreliable point-of-view (or points-of-view):


[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1824513,00.html
  2. ^ http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:jhdkyl61xpzb
  3. ^ http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/archives.php?id=22208
  4. ^ [1]
  5. ^ [2]
  6. ^ USA Today, "Violent, unappealing 'The Black Donnellys' revels in stereotypes"
  7. ^ [3]
  8. ^ http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-97074176.html
  9. ^ Thomas E. Boyle. Unreliable Narration in "The Great Gatsby". The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), pp. 21-26 [4]
  10. ^ Mudge, Alden. "Ishiguro takes a literary approach to the detective novel." [5]
  11. ^ [6]
  12. ^ a b c d e f The Guardian, "A legitimate artistic gambit", Saturday January 27, 2007
  13. ^ Interview with Gene Wolfe Conducted by Lawrence Person
  14. ^ Ferenz, Volker, "Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mememtos," New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (01 November 2005), pp. 133-159, (link, accessed 05 March 2007, reg. required).
  15. ^ Hero review in the Montreal Film Journal
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