Even if there are unlikeable narrators, we expect that we can trust them. We wouldn’t expect the narrator to be the bad guy, especially in a murder mystery. The level of surprise that this twist caused was because of how we are as readers. When they go back to his house after hearing about the murder, Sheppard mentions looking in the office and seeing the the man “as I left him.” Well, yeah, because you left him dead. However, people would reread it and realize, “Actually, no…all the clues were there we just overlooked them.”īecause that’s the thing: he never says he didn’t kill the man. So, I read it with the intention to see the “clues.” When this was first published, the ending resulted in a lot of blowback against Christie. When I read this, I knew the twist thanks to a report I did on Agatha Christie in middle school. The perfect example of this is James Sheppard, the narrator from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, who (again spoiler alert) is also the killer that Poirot is hunting. In some situations, they actually left it right there on the page, but because of how we read, out of habit or training, we missed the clues. They didn’t intentionally mislead you about who or what they were. These narrators are unreliable because the reader allowed them to be. Basically this is the narrator who doesn’t purposefully mislead you, and they have all their faculties intact. This is more of a niche situation but it is out there. I know that is a very long way to describe a type of narrator. The Narrator Who is Unreliable Based on Reader Expectations Of course, the final pages proved that my concerns were founded. It left me feeling off-kilter and unsure whether or not I could trust this narrator. When I read this book, that first sentence is what grabbed me. To say it’s a bit jarring is an understatement. At the very beginning, the narrator immediately beseeches the reader to burn the book. One book that comes to mind when I think of this type of narrator is Clive Barker’s Mister B. However, I have read and enjoyed books that implement this type of narrator. Again, please note that this will involve going into the specifications about the book, so here’s another spoiler warning. Today, I am going to go over a few of the types with a more in-depth explanation of each, including an example in popular fiction. There are also variations of the unreliable narrator. Ultimately, it comes down to how talented the author is and how well they approach it. The unreliable narrator is something that most readers have a love/hate relationship with. There’s a lot to unpack there, since it seems to try to weigh into the idea that females are less reliable than male counterparts which, to say the very least, is annoying. One thing I realized while working on this article was that all but one of the books that came to mind when thinking of unreliable narrators had female voices. Katie and Rincey mention how, at the time, it grated. But it also gives the writer a little more leeway, since it opens up the opportunity for there to be multiple facets to this spectrum.Īnother thing mentioned there is that the trend as of late appears to be unreliable female narrators. What Is an Unreliable Narrator?īy definition, an unreliable narrator is a character who tells a story with a lack of credibility. Some of these discussions will include spoilers. Please note that I will be mentioning a few books below when going more into detail the idea behind unreliable narrator. It’s the literary equivalent of jumping into the deep end of an Olympic sized pool to learn how to tread water. Now that I’m older, I’m interested in discovering more: what is an unreliable narrator, and what are the most common types we run into in literature? Now I can’t even remember what story it was, although my instinct is “ The School.” In any case, this was not the best way to introduce me to this concept. Young me felt so flummoxed by the concept of not being able to trust the person who was telling me the story that I had a distaste for it for the next decade or so. My first introduction to the idea of an unreliable narrator was through a story by Donald Barthelme in my first English class in college.
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