BtZ42 ye olde unbelievable story

[Becky Lindroos]

Sometimes a book will have split narrators - I think Mason & Dixon does.  The 3rd person narrator of the interior story is reliable (we trust what he says)  while Cherrycoke himself, in the frame story,  is unreliable.  Neither we nor the folks listening to Cherrycoke should take what he says as any kind of source material.  He exaggerates and tells tall tales,  he might even lie,  etc.  It’s for his own aggrandizement usually -  unreliable narrators have a reason for being that way - age, booze, mental condition,  guilt, ego, personality - etc.  

Yes,  1st person narrators are often unreliable,  but imo they’re not unreliable simply because they’re first person.  This is not a psychology test.    Most narrators are telling the tale as they see it,   but unless they are lying, exaggerating outrageously, mentally impaired for some reason,  a trickster, a child or very naive person,  we can generally trust what the 1st person says. Only if we find evidence that we cannot trust his/her version do we “label” them “unreliable.”   

Think Watson in Sherlock Holmes - very reliable.  The readers should believe what he says or it will be very confusing.    

Kinbote in Pale Fire (Nabokov) - completely mad and unreliable. 

Humbert Humbert in Lolita -  just defends his own despicable actions 

Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence by John Bancroft - a kind of evil trickster, imo. 

Unreliable narrators are often used in suspense novels these days: 

Gone Girl by (Gillian Flynn) has 2 unreliable 1st person narrators -  the reader is torn between which story to believe. 

 The 1st person narrator of The Girl on the Train (Paula Hawkins) is a drunk - unreliable.  

The 1st person narrator of The Room (Emma Donahue) is a child and from his pov gives a pretty accurate account,  but still,  the reader has to allow for him not really knowing what's going on so still - unreliable (we insert what we as readers put together from his basic evidence).   

Elizabeth Is Missing (Emma Healey) has a 1st person narrator who has dementia - unreliable. 

The narrator of GR is 3rd person and I suppose he's omniscient.  That said,   not all is revealed to the reader simply because that makes for good story-telling.   I don’t know as I’d go so far as to call him unreliable because he’s not doing it for any reason other than to tell a good story quite well.   

Becky 


> On Apr 10, 2016, at 8:28 AM, Becky Lindroos <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> Imo,  an unreliable narrator is a 1st person narrator (of the book not a paragraph)  who is lying to the actual reader (not just to the other characters).   The epitome of  the unreliable narrator is seen in Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd .  That book was published back in 1926 and caused much controversy -  It was unfair!  Christie cheated!  etc.  Yes,  I read it (in the ‘60s) - and was totally taken aback.   
> 
> But the actual term for what Christie did was not coined until 1961 when Wayne Booth gave it the name.   There were other unreliable narrators before Christie’s - they just weren’t given that name.  
> 
> I’ve always thought of unreliable narrators as being 1st person narrators - but I guess they can be characters within the story who are telling a long tale about themselves.  (See Cherrycoke in Mason & Dixon).   Still - I tend to call those folks unreliable characters as I don’t see them as being the real narrator.  
> 
> Becky 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 10, 2016, at 6:12 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Joseph said: 
>> In that sense I see all narrators as unreliable.  But what did the concept mean when it was introduced? To me it has always implied that the narrator, who is usually a major character is being  deceptive, dishonest, lying  to whoever is hearing/reading her/his story.
>> 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
>> 
>> This article is maybe too too for me, but ya gotta judge yourself if you even think it worth reading. 
>> 
>> One of the major 20th Century, post- overt- Depth psychology discoveries pervading the West
>> is this aspect of narrating unreliably: We are unaware, cannot see things as they are, because of psychological blinders, passions, obsession, repressions that blind us and as we talk/see honestly, not lying, we are seeing unreliably; others without our 'hangups' can see all around us and therefore us too straight.
>> 
>> One of the best novels with that theme is not on the list above. It is Ishigura's Remains of the Day. 
>> 
>> Many contemporary novelists, many who write in Englsih at least that I've read about, think The Good Soldier 
>> and Remains of the Day.....and others I don't know.....are increasingly important for artists as
>> the extent of our own self-deceptions may be growing....at least in the world they see and want to write about. An early John Irving novel was inspired by The Good Soldier, he has said. 
>> 
>> PS: 
>> Like his fellow Swiss Max Frisch, in Homo Faber(1957), Stamm [in Agnes] chooses a narrator who seems trustworthy but whose view of the world is revealed to be deeply flawed." - Peter D. Smith, Times Literary Supplement 
> 
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