UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

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

Examples of unreliable narrators

Novels

Film

Song

Television

Works featuring unreliable narrators

References

Examples of unreliable narrators

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 1962 ''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. The most famous example is the complicated and self-contradictory autobiography of the Autarch Severian, who claims to possess eidetic memory, in The Book of the New Sun. 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.
Randy Mulray, the main character in C.W. Schultz’s novel Yeval, easily qualifies as an unreliable narrator. The reader grows to know that Mulray is a very self-conscious man with a low self-esteem, which in turn makes him obviously overplay (or underplay) situations that he describes to the reader. Because he is a drug-dealer and envisions thoughts of a serial killer, there are several ''hints'' throughout the novel that Mulray could be hallucinating some of what he tells.
Daniel Keyes's ''Flowers for Algernon'' has a narrator, Charley, who could also be considered unreliable. Charley is mentally retarded, and his descriptions of events in his life reveal a very limited understanding of events around him. His vocabulary and understanding improve when an experimental treatment radically increase his intelligence, only to decline again in the final section of the novel.
In some instances, unreliable narration can bring about the fantastic in works of fiction. In Kingsley Amis's ''The Green Man'', for example, the unreliability of the narrator Maurice Allington destabilizes the boundaries between reality and the fantastic. The same applies to Nigel Williams's ''Witchcraft''.^[2]

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. The 1945 film noir classic ''Detour'' is told from the perspective of an unreliable protagonist who is trying to justify his actions.^[3][4][5]
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 Elvis 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, or 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.
In the film ''Fight Club'' (based on the book of the same name), the narrator is in fact filling the roles of two quite separate main characters. His multiple personalities are not revealed to the viewer until the conclusion of the film, casting certain scenes into doubt and leaving his motives in question.
Sometimes it is not a character narrating a story but the manner in which scenes in the film are presented that gives the audience an unreliable impression of what happened. Important events may occur off-screen, or be presented in a misleading way. Examples include the films ''A Beautiful Mind'' and ''The Sixth Sense''. In both cases the main characters suffer from mistaken ideas or delusions about their own situations, with the films designed to make the perceptions of these characters appear correct to the audience.

Song

An unreliable narrator may also appear in songs with a narrative. Eminem often uses his "Slim Shady" persona as an unreliable narrator^[6]. In "Stan", however, the unreliable narrator is actually an obsessed fan whose messages to Shady/Eminem become increasingly erratic and eventually commits a murder-suicide. Shady is presented in this song as a reliable secondary narrator^[7].
Another example of growing vehemence revealing the unreliable nature of a narrator is The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil". The narrator introduces himself as "a man of wealth and taste" and asks for sympathy from the listener, but goes on to recount tales of historic atrocities with apparent glee. Although he repeatedly refuses to reveal his true identity, it becomes obvious that the narrator is, literally, the Devil^[8].

Television

The sitcom ''How I Met Your Mother'' often employs the unreliable narrator technique. Each episode is framed as a story told by Ted Mosby to his children about his younger days. He sometimes witholds a crucial detail until the end of the story, when it throws the preceding events into a different light. In the pilot, the narrator tells his children that he wants to share the story of how he met their mother, and then describes meeting a beautiful woman. He ends the story by saying "that was how I met...your Aunt Robin", revealing that this woman was not their mother after all.
The television show ''House'' has employed unreliable narration in several episodes. 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 slowly revealed that the events portrayed might be House's hallucination rather than reality.^[9]
The television show ''The Black Donnellys'' has employed an unreliable narrator to tell its story.^[10]

Works featuring unreliable narrators

Literature featuring unreliable narrators:

★ Martin Amis's ''Time's Arrow''^[11]

★ Emily Brontë's ''Wuthering Heights''

★ Geoffrey Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales''

★ Wilkie Collins's ''The Moonstone''^[12]

★ Mark Z. Danielewski's ''House of Leaves''

★ Fyodor Dostoevsky's ''Notes from Underground''

★ Dave Eggers's ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius''

★ Bret Easton Ellis's ''American Psycho''^[13]

★ William Faulkner's ''The Sound and the Fury''

★ F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''The Great Gatsby''^[14]

★ Jonathan Safran Foer's ''Everything Is Illuminated''

★ Kazuo Ishiguro's ''When We Were Orphans''^[15]

★ Daniel Keyes' ''Flowers for Algernon''

★ John Knowles' ''A Separate Peace''

★ James Lasdun's ''The Horned Man''^[16]

★ Vladimir Nabokov's ''Pale Fire''^[17]

★ Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"

★ Marcel Proust's ''In Search of Lost Time''^[18]

★ Thomas Pynchon's ''Mason & Dixon''

★ Philip Roth's ''Portnoy's Complaint''

★ J.D. Salinger's ''The Catcher in the Rye''''The Guardian'', "A legitimate artistic gambit", Saturday January 27, 2007

★ Lemony Snicket's ''A Series of Unfortunate Events''

★ Laurence Sterne's ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman''

★ Mark Twain's ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn''

★ Gene Wolfe's ''The Fifth Head of Cerberus''^[19]
Films with an unreliable point-of-view (or points-of-view):

★ ''Brazil''

★ ''The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari''^[20]

★ ''Fight Club''

★ ''Hero'' (2002)^[21]

★ ''Jacob's Ladder''

★ ''Memento''

★ ''Rashomon''

★ ''Total Recall''

References

1. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1824513,00.html
2. Martin Horstkotte. "Unreliable Narration and the Fantastic in Kingsley Amis's ''The Green Man'' and Nigel Williams's ''Witchcraft''". ''Extrapolation'' 48,1 (2007): 137-151.
3. http://ferdyonfilms.com/2006/12/detour-1945.php
4. http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/archives/ffnoso98.html
5. http://www.film-talk.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t14372.html
6. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:jhdkyl61xpzb
7. http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/archives.php?id=22208
8. [1]
9. [2]
10. ''USA Today'', "Violent, unappealing 'The Black Donnellys' revels in stereotypes"
11. [3]
12. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-97074176.html
13. Sarah Webster. When Writer Becomes Celebrity. ''The Oxonian Review of Books'', Vol. 5, No. 2 (spring 2006) [4]
14. 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 [5]
15. Mudge, Alden. "Ishiguro takes a literary approach to the detective novel." [6]
16. [7]
17. [8]
18. http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/1/91
19. Interview with Gene Wolfe Conducted by Lawrence Person
20. Ferenz, Volker, "Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos," ''New Review of Film and Television Studies'', Vol. 3, No. 2 (01 November 2005), pp. 133-159, (link, accessed 05 March 2007, reg. required).
21. ''Hero'' review in the ''Montreal Film Journal''