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      CommentAuthorSharkonian
    • CommentTimeJul 1st 2011
     

    Well, we’ve all come across them in some way or another. I mean, I’ve read tons of books with unreliable narrators.

    What I want to know is, how can you show the reader that your narrator is unreliable? Especially if the point of view is first person?

    I’ve seen it done one way, in the Bartimaeus Trilogy: The Amulet of Samarkand where it switched between Bartimaeus and Nathaniel’s point of view. In Bartimaeus’ he said that he was calm and collected, but when it switched to Nathaniel’s we saw the exact opposite.

    However, how would you show that your narrator is unreliable in first person, with that character’s view being the only one presented?

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      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeJul 1st 2011
     

    Make a disconnection with what the narrator assumes and what the reader sees. For example, the narrator might say/think/ assume some basic truth about, for example, the Finn-Walo people of the southern mountains being untrustworthy and/or deceitful. But then you show via action and dialogue that they are neither of those things, and slowly the reader begins to question the narrator’s point of view. It has to be extremely subtle, of course, or you risk either falling into caricature, or preaching/soap-box ranting. Unreliable narration is usually something that is established over the entire length of the story, rather than at the very start. Ideally readers should trust the narrator up until about the 2/3rds mark; not because you suddenly switch things up, but because previous hints have been subtle and overlooked. So in that sense it’s much the same as setting up foreshadowing for a major plot twist, like Snape being a good guy all along. The signs are there, but because of the unreliability of the central character’s perspective, reinforced by similarly-unreliable secondary characters, readers either miss them or dismiss them.

  1.  

    I’m sure we already have this thread.

  2.  

    My mistake, the Series of Unfortunate Events thread has a discussion of it.

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      CommentAuthorSharkonian
    • CommentTimeJul 1st 2011
     

    I’m sure we already have this thread.

    I probably should have searched in the comments part, too. But I only looked in topics, so that’s probably why there was already a discussion about it and I didn’t notice. Sorry.

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      CommentAuthorThea
    • CommentTimeJul 1st 2011
     

    Well, I’ve written three main characters who have been described as pathological, and only once was it intentional (the others were supposed to be extreme, but not crazy.) But anyway, the intentional one was unreliable—since it was for a class and for some reason there had been three stories about abused wives working up to leaving their husbands. Since I don’t really get that mindset, I wanted to look at 1) the abuser’s pov, and 2) let the wife not put up with it. So most of the story is him justifying it (it only happened once, etc, you know, that he’d normally tell her, manipulate her, but she won’t put up with it). The unreliability is set up pretty much right off when he’s fired and his boss tells him so, but since he’s the pov character the reader’s supposed to still want to be on his side, at least until it’s clear what he’s done—which, like Taku said (though I’d not thought of it that way before) is revealed about 2/3 of the way through. But in this case, you can tell he’s unreliable not just because of how the other characters interact with him—he dismisses a co-worker as a ‘little girl’ when in a flashback it’s revealed that (before) she sympathized with him and wanted to help him out—but also because you get to the point where you realize his entire worldview is completely skewed.

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      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeJul 1st 2011
     

    The first unreliable narrator I really noticed was in 300, actually, and that’s more to explain away all the inconsistencies—basically, the narrator is telling the story to get other people pumped up and brag about how awesome the Spartans are, so it’s understandable that there’d be some significant exaggeration.

    Unreliable narrators are interesting, though, if they can be pulled off well. When you work out that it is an unreliable narrator, it puts the whole thing in an entirely different light.

  3.  

    A discussion of unreliable narrators is incomplete without Humbert Humbert.

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      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeJul 1st 2011 edited
     

    Oh, and Wuthering Heights. I strongly suspect Nelly (the servant who tells the story) is somewhat biased in the telling, in particular because it’s obvious she really hates Heathcliff.

  4.  

    I always think of Holden Caulfield and Gene from A Separate Peace.