Alice LaPlante - On the Pleasures of Unreliable Narrators

Why do we take so much pleasure in unreliable narrators in the thrillers and mysteries we read? For we are enormously entertained by them. It’s no accident that recent blockbusters Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and The Woman in the Window all feature unreliable narrators. (Strong female narrators I might add.)

Let’s back up and take a tour of the backstory. A work of fiction has an unreliable narrator when it is told from the perspective of a character who is deficient in some way.  Morally deficient. Intellectually deficient. Physically. Emotionally. You name it. Any deficiency that would prevent you, the reader, from implicitly trusting what that character says indicates unreliability.

William Riggan in 1981 helpfully classified unreliable narrators into four types. The picaro exaggerates and brags (Moll from Moll Flanders). The madman has difficulties discerning reality from delusion or fantasy (Charles Kinbote from Nabokov’s Pale Fire). The clown deliberately circumvents our expectations and plays with conventions (almost anything by Kurt Vonnegut), and the naïf’s perceptions are limited by immaturity or knowledge of the world (Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye). Finally, the liar is someone with normal cognitive capabilities who deliberately tells untruths (both Nick and Amy from Gone Girl).

Wayne C. Booth came up with the term unreliable narrators in 1961 in his influential The Rhetoric of Fiction, but unreliable narrators themselves have been around for thousands of years. Plautus's comedy Miles Gloriosus, in which a soldier grandiosely exaggerates his triumphs, is the best-known example from the dramas of ancient Greece. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, we get the fall from grace from Satan’s point of view—certainly not someone you would depend on for the unvarnished truth. Later on, The Canterbury Tales gives us stories told by patently dubious characters such as the Merchant and the Wife of Bath.

What’s the deal? Why do we keep reading?

First, there’s the pleasure of the puzzle: what is the truth if I can’t trust this narrator? What clues has the writer given to guide me toward an understanding of what reality is? You’re playing a mental cat-and-mouse game, and that’s fun.

There’s also the pleasure of a dramatic surprise when everything you thought true turns out to be false. What? We’ve been led around by a ghost? (Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense). Okay, that’s a movie, but I didn’t want to give away any literary spoilers.

But in my view, the true value of an unreliable narrator is to give us unique insights into the world that would otherwise be missed if a story were told “straight.”

What if Catcher in the Rye had been told from a mature adult perspective? Or Lolita had been written from a neutral, omniscient third-person point of view? How much would we, as an audience, have lost?

A lot. We would have missed the opportunity getting a very different perspective on the world—a world we take for granted, with all its social and moral norms and mores (not to mention actual laws).  

But what do we get from seeing life from, for example, the perspective of the unapologetic pedophile Humbert Humbert? We are clearly meant to regard Humbert as an abomination. Humbert himself eventually admits—in some of the most moving paragraphs of the book—that  he has utterly destroyed another human being through his actions. Do we really benefit from seeing inside this man’s monstrous soul?

I would say yes.

The more we see, the more we understand. I would suggest we better see the true horror of what humans are capable of by inhabiting Humbert for the 300-plus pages Nabokov has given us. We don’t have to approve of or accept Humbert’s behavior.  But we learn from it.

With this, I would go further than William Riggan and suggest there’s a fifth kind of unreliable narrator, of which Humbert is an example. A very important kind of narrator for our day and age.

The outsider.

The outsider stands apart from mainstream society. Sometimes she is forced into that position because of her race, or her sexuality, her religion, her social status, or some other attribute that make others reject her. Callie (Cal) Stephanides in Middlesex. Frances Phelan in Ironweed. Celle in The Color Purple.

Sometimes he chooses to be an outsider, like the unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer. Or Humbert Humbert.

Why would outsiders be considered unreliable? Because they give us a view of reality that’s skewed when compared to mainstream attitudes. They shock us with contrary opinions, actions.

To give you an example from a different genre, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, which is billed as a standup comedy routine by Netflix, but goes way beyond that. As an outsider unreliable narrator, Gadsby gives us an extraordinarily powerful view of what our world looks like from someone who’s been pushed to the fringes. It ain’t pretty.

Which is the point. The unreliable narrator tells us truths that we simply couldn’t get any other way. And given the state of the world, given our current mainstream reality, we desperately need more so-called unreliable outsiders to make their voices heard—in literature and beyond.

Half Moon Bay by Alice LaPlante – Published by Titan Books

Jane O'Malley loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Devastated, she makes one tiny stab at a new life and moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay. As the months go by she is able to cobble together some possibility of peace. Then children begin to disappear, and soon Jane sees her own pain reflected in all the parents in the town. She wonders if she will be able to live through the aching loss, the fear once again surrounding her, but as the disappearances continue, fingers of suspicion all begin to point at her

Natasha Bell on Finding Her Genre

There’s a certain amount of luxury to writing your first book: no pressure, no deadlines, no expectations. Of course, the benefits of all this luxury are inevitably overshadowed by a persistent sense of self-doubt, a need to fit writing around the day job/life/everything else, and the big, overriding yet unanswerable question: “Why on earth am I doing this to myself?” Still, you’ll often find authors looking back nostalgically at writing their first book, and I’m no exception.

The biggest luxury I realise I had but didn’t recognise when I first set out to write Exhibit Alexandra was naiveté about genre. I started with a story: I knew Alexandra was missing, I knew what had happened to her, and I knew her husband Marc would need to find her. The plot was clear to me; what was not, was how to tell it.  It’s taken me eight years and I don’t know how many drafts to get from that initial idea to the novel I now get to hold in my hands. What seems crystal-clear in hindsight is that, for those eight years, most of what I was looking for was my genre. Even so, it wasn’t until I had a book deal and was sitting in a meeting room with my editor while she all but bashed my head against the table to make me see it, that I properly realised what I was writing.

The thing about finding your genre is that it makes you wonder how you ever thought you belonged anywhere else. You don’t realise you’re playing Prince Charming trying to slip a glass slipper onto dozens of knobbly feet until you find the one it fits. I’d floundered around for so long trying to tell this story in all the wrong ways, that there was a beauty and obviousness when I finally hit upon the right way. Story and genre felt interconnected.

Exhibit Alexandra straddles a few labels: crime, psychological thriller, domestic noir, and what Jake Kerridge appears to have coined “cellar-lit”. One of the early reviews describes its unreliable female narrator as a “nigh-exhausted genre.” The rest of the review was lovely, so I won’t take exception too much, but it did get me thinking. First (because I’m an angry feminist), about why, after centuries of unreliable male narration, we can only apparently stomach a few years of the female equivalent. And, second, about what it is that makes the crime and thriller genres so ripe for this kind of story.

What unreliable narration does is force us to explore the complexities of a character. It asks us to be active readers, looking out for hints and clues that the character misses, but also building an image of them as a whole, inconsistent and struggling human being. We might open a book looking for a story, seeking escape, but an unreliable narrator and particularly a female one will push against our instinctive passivity as readers. She’s prickly. She refuses to sit neatly into the hero’s journey. She won’t allow us to pigeon-hole her. And we definitely won’t finish the novel feeling anything as simple as like or dislike.

The strength of doing this in a crime book is that the genre already has great form for

destabilisation. Time and again it presents us with the world we know – with recognisable characters, locations and scenes – then violently disrupts it. By portraying but disturbing the everyday, we’re forced to re-examine it. Alexandra is an ordinary woman, a wife and a mother. Because of this, it is only through her disappearance that we (and her husband) begin to pay attention to everything else that was going on in her life before she disappeared.

My first draft was told from Marc’s point of view and later I tried out third person, but it wasn’t until I realised this was Alexandra’s story to tell that it properly came to life. By using her unreliable voice and adding an obvious layer of subjectivity to all of the events of the novel, hopefully the process of destabilisation works on both the characters’ lives and on our act of reading them.  In hindsight, Exhibit Alexandra could not have been any other kind of book, but I’m strangely grateful for my meandering journey into this genre. I think if I’d set out to write crime, then the narrative I’d have come up with would have been less complex, less rich and less challenging (both to write and to read). By doing it this way, though, genre and story are in equal partnership, pushing against as much as complementing one another.

Old Unreliable by Carol Goodman

Today’s guest blog is by Carol Goodman who is talking about the unreliable narrator.  She is the bestselling author of fourteen novels, including The Lake of Dead Languages which sold more than 160,000 copies and The Seduction of Water, which won the 2003 Hammett Prize. She has been nominated for the Simon & Schuster-Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Nero Wolfe Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and more. She lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches creative writing at The New School and SUNY New Paltz.

Hello.  It’s me, your old friend.  What you don’t remember me?  We went to high school together.  I lent you my copy of Catcher in the Rye.  You lent me your copy of I Am the Cheese and then I spoiled the ending for you.  Or maybe we met at a party.  You don’t remember?  You had had a few—and so, come to think of it, had I.  I don’t remember much of what happened after that.  I may have hit something on the way home but I’m pretty sure it was a deer.  Or perhaps you remember me from that old book by Nabokov, the one in which that saucy little girl seduces me!  What?  You don’t believe a 12-year-old girl could seduce an old charmer like me?  Well just listen, and I’ll show you how it’s done.

Some have accused me of lying but I maintain that only the unimaginative look at my talents so basely.  Perhaps I embellish, but who doesn’t?  Who would you rather listen to—a slave to the truth or a born storyteller who knows how to convey the essence of the truth? What would Don Quixote be without his dragons to slay?  After all, everything is subjective.  We all have our biases, our blind spots, our secrets. Who’s to say that my version of the truth isn’t as valid as yours?  Like my friends Tom Sawyer, Holden Caulfield or Forrest Gump, I may just not understand everything I see, but I’ve got an inventive way of putting it.  Or I may be suffering from some traumatic incident—the death of a spouse, horror on the battlefield, a history of child abuse—that causes me to evade certain facts.  Perhaps I’m a soldier suffering PTSD who can’t admit his best buddy is dead, or a diffident butler who doesn’t want to face his master’s pro-Hitler leanings, or an amnesiac who doesn’t want to remember that he killed his wife.  Can you blame us?  Haven’t you ever pushed some uncomfortable truth to the rear of your mind in order to get on with it?  Or had a few too many drinks to make it through the day?  That doesn’t make us crazy, although between you and me and that figure in the wallpaper over there, I may be.  In fact, if you look closely at my stationery, you’ll see I’m writing this from a mental hospital, but they say I’ll get out soon and who’s to say just when I started going crazy or when I started getting better?

Besides, if I’m crazy, what about the rest of you phonies?  You act like you’re looking for the truth, but I’ve never enjoyed such popularity!  Since a certain “girl” (talk about embellishment!) burst on the scene I am in high demand.  I am entertaining!  I keep you guessing until the last page and, as I think you’re beginning to see, we’re not so different you and I.  You envy my ability to shape the truth and suspect I hold the key to figuring out the world around you.  Because, let’s face it, who can you trust these days?  Politicians?  The banks?  The media?  Your neighbors?  Your best friend?  Your husband?  Your wife?  As my good friend Tom Sawyer once said, “I never seen anybody but lied one time or another.”  

Far better to get used to it.  Learn to spot the exaggeration, the delusion, the evasion, the misunderstanding, the lie.  I can teach you all that and give you a good time along the way.  I promise it won’t be dull.  Trust me.  

Books (and two films) mentioned and alluded to: Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier, River Road by Carol Goodman,  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov,  Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Forrest Gump, Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, Memento, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

River Road by Carol Goodman (Titan Books) is out now £7.99

She came out of nowhere - Nan Lewis—a creative writing professor at a college in upstate New York—is driving home from a faculty holiday party after finding out she’s been denied tenure. On her way, she hits a deer, but when she gets out of her car to look for it, the deer is nowhere to be found. Eager to get home and out of the oncoming snowstorm, Nan is forced to leave her car at the bottom of her snowy driveway to wait out the longest night of the year—and the lowest point of her life…The next morning, Nan is woken up by a police officer at her door with terrible news—one of her students, Leia Dawson, was killed in a hit-and-run on River Road the night before. And because of the damage to her car, Nan is a suspect. In the days following the accident, Nan is shunned by the same community that rallied around her when her own daughter was killed in an eerily similar accident six years prior. When Nan begins finding disturbing tokens that recall the death of her daughter, Nan suspects that the two accidents are connected.  As she digs further, she discovers that everyone around her, including Leia, is hiding secrets. But can she uncover them, clear her name, and figure out who really killed Leia before her reputation is destroyed for good?

You can find more information about Carol Goodman on her website and you can follow her on Twitter @C_Goodmania and on Facebook.