emotional incongruency between narrator and reader?

Dramatic irony. The audience are aware of something that the character is ignorant of. Say X character isn't feeling scared but we are. We know his actions are bad- he doesn't.

Emotional distance? Or emotional manipulation?

Um, spoiler? I've seen both those films, and so have millions of people, but I'm sure there are one or two out there who might not have seen them yet intend to see them at some point. The first post would absolutely ruin both of them for anyone who hasn't seen them.

Maybe a mod can add *spoiler* to the title?

"The Usual Suspects" also has an unreliable narrator. "Verbal" is lying throughout most of the movie. But the movie has a lot of emotional INcongruency. While watching the story play out, the audience may be feeling worried about poor Verbal caught in the crossfire, poor Verbal watching the fire burn. But Verbal wasn't feeling sorry for himself at all. Everything was going exactly according to his plan. So, for most of the movie, the audience, living teh story through Verbal's shoes, is feeling scared for Verbal, but the entire time Verbal was not feeling scared at all.

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Oh, another example of incongruency is when the narrator cries but the reader is indifferent. I remember a Harry Potter fan I knew telling me that they didn't like the scene in the book where Harry lashes out and cries and does all sort of other emotionally extreme things when [snipped]. They felt disconnected from Harry, because Harry was reacting much more extreme than they would have.

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It seems like you're talking about two different things here. It's one thing if a character is purposefully keeping information from other characters, and therefore the reader. It's entirely different if a character's emotions are there on the page but a reader just isn't feeling it.

The latter is way more subjective, and not something you can control for every single reader.

Empathy is knowing what someone else feels; sympathy is wanting someone else to be satisfied. An antonym of empathy is misunderstanding; antonyms of sympathy are disdain or indifference.

Empathy in fiction comes about by strong dialogue and good narration. Much of the point of the writer's adage 'show don't tell' is to keep the story's emotions accessible and interesting to the reader. But sympathy comes about when we find characters that want what we want, or that suffer. This can give us very different kinds of sympathetic character.

When a character wants what we want it becomes an idealisation of ourselves. We instantly identify with characters who share our struggles. We want to feel what they feel (or more to the point we want them to feel what we feel). We want them to be heroes; we equate meeting their desires to filling the world with good. Such characters are an escape for us.

But another kind of sympathetic character doesn't have to be heroic or even likeable. All it needs to do is suffer.

In Gogol's short story The Overcoat, the main character is a poor government clerk who needs a new overcoat, goes to great effort to have a new one made, then has it stolen. His fruitless efforts to have the authorities take an interest in the theft is the subject of the story. We haven't necessarily had those experiences ourselves, but we understand that the overcoat is both warmth and respectability and that losing both is terrible, so we sympathise even when we don't feel every single emotion he has.

In Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden, on the death of their mother four children hide the fact that they're orphans from the rest of the world. None of the children are greatly likeable, and some are outright repulsive. With their parents gone their home-life devolves into Lord of the Flies, but we never lose our sympathy for them because they're suffering from lack of parenting.

As well as bridging our empathy, a narrator's job is to get us to invest our sympathy somewhere. The critical 'hook' at the start of the story is nothing more than our decision to care about the story -- and that means caring about some of its characters.

But caring about them doesn't mean we have to identify with them. The difference between escapist and non-escapist fiction may well be that one question: does the story ask us to believe that we are one of its characters?

I could think of a purposeful manipulation, where a writer uses another character's downfall intentionally as comedic relief. If it's overly dramatic or the character isn't likable, or has it coming.

Not sure if that has anything to do with what you're saying.