Unreliable narrators

I've been toying with the idea of writing a novel with an unreliable narrator -- meaning that all the facts aren't known about her until later in the book. What I want to avoid is making the reader feel "cheated" by her omission.

I found a definition of unreliable narrators at this website. I'll reproduce it here so you don't have to bother with the link.

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RELIABILITY AND FIRST-PERSON NARRATION

We call a narrator credible, reliable, or sympathetic when he or she more or less conforms to one or more of the following:

1. Shares values with implied author.

2. Shares values with the reader.

3. Accurately observes and records his or her "reality."

4. Encourages reader rapport and trust.

5. Examples: Holden Caufield, Huck Finn, Nick Carraway, Tommy in "The Gryphon."


We call a narrator unreliable, untrustworthy or unsympathetic when he or she more or less conforms to one or more of the following;

1. Lies deliberately out of self-interest.

2. Denies role in events from a lack of self-awareness.

3. Expresses ideas or values reader may find reprehensible.

4. May be incapacitated in some way: Benji in The Sound and the Fury; the narrator of "A Flower for Algernon."

5. Records events accurately but interprets them in a way that is at odds or contrary with our own: narrator of "Why I Live at the P.O." The narrator of "The Idea."

Two Notes:

1. Excellent fiction can be created using any or all conceiveable states of reliability or unreliability, and many stories depend on the ambiguity and shades between to achieve their effect, as can be seen in Sammie's account of his quitting his job in Updike's "A & P."

2. Problems arise when readers and writers fail to agree on the degree and extent of a narrator's reliability or unreliability.

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My questions are:

1. Does the whole concept of having an unreliable narrator assume a first person POV?

2. Can you think of any contemporary examples of an unreliable narrator?

3. What are the pitfalls of this approach?

4. Would it be less deceiving to the reader if I make the unreliable person not the POV character?

Thanks for all your advice.

This is an excellent question.

First of all, I disagree with that website telling us that Holden Caufield is reliable. His entire narrative is colored by his internal motives and feelings, I think. And that's what makes it so humorous and so delightful. For example, his idea that these teeny streaks of grey in his temples make him look a lot older than his 16. His hitting on his schoolmate Ramsey's mom, her being polite but not laughing at him out loud.

Anyway -- an unreliable narrator is a tricky way to write, but it's time tested and superbly effective.

Most of the time it's 1st person narrative but it's also used in 3rd person "supposedly" omnicient narrative. Joyce does this to great effect in "Ulysses", particularly clever and funny in Chapter 13, Nausicaa, about the young woman Gerty MacDowell, as she and her two girlfriends relax on the beach, Leopold Bloom watching.

Here's a brief excerpt:

"Her hands were of finely veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums
had of course their little tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not to let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she'd never speak to her again."

The 3rd person narrative begins lofty and slides right into a catfight. It goes this way throughout, and is written (as you see) in "Schoolgirl" prose, kind of like reading Cosmo or Seventeen.

The idea of an omnicient narrative being "written" from the viewpoint of the character is called the "Uncle Charles" principle, as evinced by the Joycean scholar Hugh Kenner in his excellent book "Joyce's Voices".

I'm using a flawed 1st person narrative myself, in my "Mitch King" private detective novels. They are tinted by Mitch's own internal feelings and the narrative is therefore filtered somewhat.

You can read about this on my website. Scan down below the synopsis of my novels, and read the "essay" I wrote about my ongoing series of novels. Then let me know if this is what you're talking about

Sam Waas Mysteries

In The Remains of the Day, the protagonist (the butler) denies his complicity in carrying out his master's orders, and he clearly doesn't understand his own heart. The reader sees what he cannot. It's a beautifully done piece of work.

Remains of the Day -- an excellent example.

First of all, I disagree with that website telling us that Holden Caufield is reliable.

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This was my immediate thought, as well. I was pretty shocked to see him grace a "reliable" list. Now, this is sort of backwards, but the main character in L'etranger tends to be "unreliable" by critics, but I find him a very reliable source of information, in the sense that I don't feel he's "lying" about the events. Sometimes things are just a little fuzzy.

As for contemporary novels, I just finished the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon. He's "unreliable" by the requirements you listed - a 15 or so year old boy graced with some kind of disorder. I'm guessing autism. He is the POV character, and the novel's written in first person.

I think you can succeed with first person, and without cheating or deceiving the reader. If your character doesn't normally show that much emotion, the readers don't have to know about it, either. (Check out L'etranger again for this. Camus is excellent.) If the character is, say, immersed in a murder mystery, they won't automatically know everything, and have to learn along the way all the little things which will attribute to the conflict.

I think when you start to edge into that danger zone, though, is when the main character knows the solution to the problem way off the bat, then suddenly decides to reveal the answer on the last page.

Agree with katdad: Holden Caulfield is not reliable. Salinger said (paraphrasing here) Holden's inner world is that of a boy whose brother has died.

The correct title of another work cited is "Flowers for Algernon."

You might consider Scout in To Kill a Mockingbirdan unreliable narrator in a more subtle way just because she was a child witnessing events that she didn't fully understand. The reader is left to draw conclusions about the societal context, her father's bravery and integrity, and so forth.

A story can have an unreliable POV character whose distorted perceptions are reported in third person. "Edgar was hungry, but he'd wait till dark to go out for groceries. He had to be careful. Those teenaged sisters in the next house always stared at him. Even when they weren't at the window, they were thinking about him. He just knew. He could feel their shameful thoughts coming through the walls. It was embarrassing. They probably looked at dirty magazines, too. Oh, they pretended not to notice him, but Edgar knew what girls wanted, secretly. Maybe one of these days he'd give it to them. Serve 'em right."

Apologies to anyone out there whose name happens to be Edgar.

"The first sentence in the Book of Bokonon is this:
'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.'
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
So be it."


And so begins Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant satire Cat's Cradle. This passage is about a book within Cat's Cradle. But it does a perfect job of telling the readers that anything is open game and nothing is to be believed. I think if you did something simliar near the beginning of your story, the reader would never have an excuse to feel "cheated."

The only pitfall I have when reading a book with an unreliable narrator is that I often feel there is a distance between the narrator and me that cannot be bridged. I don't feel close to him/her. Fortunately, this is usually exactly what the author is going for.

Cheers.

I can't think of a narrator that isn't unreliable in some way.

You are telling the story from a POV: That POV is someone specific and a view of truth.

I see a pretty young woman, my friend sees a pair of hips that are too wide, someone else sees eyes that remind him of his sister -- What is reliable in that?

We all discover things about ourselves we did not know before, others see things about us we do not see -- We are only as reliable as our POV at best.

Does the narrator deliberately conceal or lie to the reader to mislead them? If so that would strike me as unfair to the reader unless the reader had a fair chance to surmise the deception.

Can it be done? Ask Agatha Christie: Her last Hercule Poirot novel.

I don't understand Charlie ("Flowers for Algernon") as an unreliable narrator. I can see the writer of that list would have put him in such a place because of his childlike nature and innocence, but can't we also take his behavior into consideration for the fact that he won't lie because of it? Sure, not everything makes sense as Charlie sees the world, but he certainly never denies feelings and emotions, or anything he sees around him. It's these narrators, who might not have all the details, but share everything they know - that I mark as reliable. Maybe it's just me?

I was surprised by the Holden Caufield=reliable narrator remark as well.

Most often unreliable narrators are 1st person. When you write in 3rd person, the invisible "narrator" should be reliable -- unless of course, you have 3rd limited where the narrative is basically filtered through a POV character -- in that case, it's almost 1st person.

I do not recall any non-1st person unreliable narrator... I am sure there are exceptions for everything.

No, Writing Again, "unreliable narrator" doesn't mean the narrator may not have the right facts. In that case, that's true that most 1st person narrators do not know everything or may get something wrong or go down the wrong paths (a detective/narrator in mystery, for example).

"Unreliable" means the narrator actually deceives the readers in some way by not "telling the truth." That the readers have every reason to not trust the narrator. If the narrator says "it's raining out there" the readers can't trust him for telling the truth.

Or, in Edgar's case, he's delusional. He might think he's telling the truth, but the readers can't know, thus they can't trust him. He says things even if he doesn't know if it's true or not.

But if the narrator is telling the truth (to the readers) but he deceives the other characters, then he's still considered a reliable narrator (just not a very honest character). For example, the boy who writes:

I know who killed Bobby Fisher. I saw it. I saw the whole thing -- Mr. Snow did it. But when my mother asked me, I said, "No mother. I know nothing."

The boy in A Painted House is considered a reliable narrator, I think, because he always tells the truth TO the readers, but he lies to his parents and everyone around him for fear of being exposed. However, the readers ALWAYS know when he's lying because he tells the readers that he's lying. The readers always know when he's confused and not sure, because he tells us. It's as if the boy and the readers are in the know of the secrets... the readers are the accomplice.

Holden Caufiled, on the other hand, is unreliable, I think. Because the way he presents the "facts" to the readers are tinted. You never really know if he's telling you (the readers) the truth.

My character in The Pacific Between is semi-unreliable in that he doesn't necessarily tell the readers lies, but there are times when he's so confused or delusional that he tells the readers the wrong thing. The readers still can't always trust the narrator, but at the same time, they know he won't deliberately lie to them.

It's very difficult to write unreliable narrators because there's that trust issue between author and reader. But the reward can be really great -- to have a flawed character telling a story and have the readers willing to take that ride with him/her.

Thanks for all the interesting replies.

@katdad:
"I'm using a flawed 1st person narrative myself, in my 'Mitch King' private detective novels. They are tinted by Mitch's own internal feelings and the narrative is therefore filtered somewhat."

Filtered such that the crime he's investigating is portrayed innaccurately, or (as I suspect) filtered in such a way that he interprets his findings based on his emotions? If it is the latter, isn't that true of every decent narrator?


@macalicious:
"I think when you start to edge into that danger zone, though, is when the main character knows the solution to the problem way off the bat, then suddenly decides to reveal the answer on the last page."

I agree wholeheartedly -- that's a total cheat. I was thinking more of her emotional response, as in debraji's example Remains of the Day.


@Writing Again:
"Does the narrator deliberately conceal or lie to the reader to mislead them? If so that would strike me as unfair to the reader unless the reader had a fair chance to surmise the deception."

As with macalicious's comment above, agreed, that's a cheat.


@dannyne:
"The only pitfall I have when reading a book with an unreliable narrator is that I often feel there is a distance between the narrator and me that cannot be bridged. I don't feel close to him/her. Fortunately, this is usually exactly what the author is going for."

This hadn't occured to me; but that's the heart of it, isn't it? With this sort of narrator you've got a built-in distance that may serve to disenchant your reader. Hmmm.


@maestrowork:
"It's very difficult to write unreliable narrators because there's that trust issue between author and reader. But the reward can be really great -- to have a flawed character telling a story and have the readers willing to take that ride with him/her."

So in this case, you write the thing, then judge it by Uncle Jim's valuable rule: Does it work?

Lots of very interesting things for me to think about.


@Reph:
That Edgar guy is wicked creepy! :eek

Does it work?

Yup. That's the carrot, isn't it?

I was worried that my semi-unreliable narrator would alienate my readers. Some did find him somewhat distant, and some found him not very likable; that was exactly what I aimed for. But the question still remained: Do the readers care enough to want to take the ride with him?

At the end, according to all my readers, the answer was an encouraging "yes." Especially women. They looked at the narrator as a hurt little boy... and even when he became rude or self-absorbed or confused, my female readers wanted to "take him aside and feed him chicken soup."

The answer, I think, is this: Is there any redeeming quality in your narrator/protagonist? Can you find a reason to root for him, even if he's not very trust-worthy or even likeable?

If Hannibal Lecter were the narrator, then he would have been an unreliable one. But would we still find him fascinating and "interesting" enough to go along with him?

Re: Does it work?

I was just looking through the "Meet the Writers" feature on Barnes & Noble.com. I came upon Jodi Picoult through a link under Jeffrey Eugenides' bio, and under the little interview Picoult writes this:

What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you?

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The gold standard for unreliable narrators.

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I thought it was interesting, given the topic just came up. Strange. Even though it's been a few years since I read it, I never thought much about Nick being unreliable, either. I've hardly agreed with any of the examples!

I think I'm going to have to research this topic a little more, just for myself.

Re: Does it work?

macalicious: I agree with you about Charlie.

Writing Again: Insofar as everyone has perceptual biases, any narrator will be unreliable. Still, the line is drawn somewhere. It's a matter of degree, I guess, and the nature of the distortions.

Next question for discussion: Did Edgar Allan Poe invent the unreliable narrator?

Re: Does it work?

Reph, what a perfect example. Here'sThe Tell-Tale Heart.

Short, creepy as hell, and incredibly effective (I still remember the ending from reading it in high school, roughly six million years ago). The narrator is totally unreliable, in fact, that's the heart of the story (so to speak).

Re: Does it work?

This is from Wikipedia:


In literature and film, an unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability or powerful bias. Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience makes them inherently unreliable. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; in contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.

Many have suggested that all first-person narration, and indeed narration generally, is inescapably unreliable.


Works of fiction featuring unreliable narrators:

Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Humbert Humbert)
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Charles Kinbote)
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (Miles Coverdale)
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (the unnamed governess)
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat", "The Cask of Amontillado", and perhaps "Ligeia"
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground
Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club
Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho
John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure
Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter
Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun and the vast majority of his other work.
Lu Xun's A True Story of Ah Q


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

Christopher McQuarrie's The Usual Suspects (Verbal Kint)
Christopher Nolan's Memento (Leonard Shelby)
Mary Harron's American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (James Cole), Brazil (Sam Lowry), and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Munchausen)
Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, based on Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "In a Grove" and "Rashomon"
Alexander Payne's Election
The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (The Stranger)

Re: Does it work?

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Humbert Humbert)

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I'm going to have to think about that one long and hard. I don't know if I'd classify Humbert Humbert as unreliable or not.

Reph: Thanks. Glad to know I'm not crazy. Or, you know, just the only one.

unfair to the reader

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If the narrator conceals from the reader, it may be "unfair" and especially so if the narrator is, on the surface, the omniscient 3rd party.

But Joyce (among others) does this for effect, and for perpetrating a great joke upon the reader, the reader being a willing participant. Of course "Ulysses" isn't the ordinary novel, and it takes great skill to pull something like that off, and not appear condescending or patronizing, nor appear malicious.

I do not recall any non-1st person unreliable narrator

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As I said, it happens throughout "Ulysses". And then there's the "Wake" which is one great intricate joke upon the world, ourselves included.

You must understand that Joyce's unreliable yet seeming omniscent 3rd person narrator is not mean-spirited. It's a parodic voice that we quickly pick up on, and take pleasure in reading. The "Nausicaa" chapter (#13) is especially humorous.

he interprets his findings based on his emotions

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That, of course, and more. He colors all his discussion of the world around him through his interior lenses, and they are flawed.

In American hardboiled private detective fiction, we're used to the 1st person narrator (the PI) as a stoic, retro, and very uptight moral arbiter and commentator on the vagaries of the world. This is pretty much the standard of PI fiction.

So I switch it around. My narrator seems to be reliable but instead lies to himself, and to us in the process. Check my website to learn more, and maybe comment on this. I posted the link earlier.

Would you include accounts of supernatural/spiritual occurrences? Whitley Strieber, for example, goes so far as to present Communion as a true account of his own experiences, yet since these experiences can be neither proved nor disproved scientifically, he is surely an unreliable narrator. Ok, the validity of the example is debatable since it's not strictly a work of pure fiction, but I'd include any account of an alien abduction, haunting, angel encounter, etc as opposed to general monster horror/sci-fi/fantasy.
Did that make sense?

Would you include accounts of supernatural/spiritual occurrences?...

I don't believe you can say there's an unreliable narrator in a nonfiction work. A narrator is a character created by the author, not the author speaking in his or her own voice–and the narrator is unreliable by the author's design.

I'm not familiar with the book you named. Suppose Joe Schmo really believes there are fairies (no, not that kind) at the bottom of his garden and he writes a novel with a first-person narrator who invites the tiny creatures in for tea, listens to their stories, and all that. Joe didn't mean his narrator to be unreliable. Perhaps he'll write another novel with a different narrator, a skeptic who refuses to consider any evidence of fairies. In Joe's mind, this second narrator is deluded and unreliable.

Ok, I was tired when I wrote that. What I was getting at was that the author is clearly aware that an alien abduction experience has several possible explanations, largely involving psychology and neurology, and therefore in recounting (albeit in a fictional context) an actual physical abduction he surely calls the reliability of the narrator into question. Or not. I don't know, it was just a thought.

It doesn't matter what the author thinks, though. It's what the character thinks that matters. In a fictional context, everything could be true. Fairies could be real. Dragons are real living things... but if the character believes in fairies, but in the context of the fictional world, there're no fairies, then the character is unreliable.