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
