Narrators: Reliable and Otherwise

SPOILER ALERT: Read no further if you haven't already read or seen Fight Club and think you might like to some day.

When reading or watching movies, does it ever occur to you that what you’re being told might not be all that reliable? Do you ever suspect that the narrator may be twisting the truth, leaving things out, or perhaps simply perceiving things so differently that it’s hard to tell what’s really going on? 

A typical narrator will tell you exactly what’s going on, and won’t lie about it. Using an unreliable narrator is a great way to add some mystery to a piece of work. 

One of the perhaps most well-known unreliable narrators is Jack, from Fight Club. At the start of the book and the movie, Jack meets Tyler Durden. They become close friends, and they create Fight Club. The thing is, Tyler isn’t real; he’s a creation of Jack’s mind. Jack doesn’t realise this until it’s nearly the end of the book/movie, and because he’s the narrator, even if the readers have their suspicions, they can’t really know for sure. 

The result of which is that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, kept the readers guessing. It was used as a great plot twist near the end, and was responsible for a great deal of suspense. Because Tyler isn’t really there, it leads readers to imagine what the different interactions between Jack and Tyler looked like from outside of Jack’s head.

A more extreme and less known example is the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The short story is written like a series of journal entries. It begins rather innocently, with the narrator writing about staying in a beautiful estate over the summer, even mentioning that her husband doesn’t believe that she is sick. Gradually, with each new entry, the narrator becomes more and more unreliable. It becomes clear that the narrator is mentally unstable. It gets to the extent that she begins to see people in the patterns of the wallpaper in her room, and comes to believe that she, herself, was once trapped inside those patterns and had escaped. 

Because we know that she isn’t reliable, it’s hard to tell what it is that she’s really doing. She could have been lying down and staring at the ceiling the whole time. She could have been gnawing at her bedposts or attempting to climb the walls for all that we know. 

Forcing readers to use their imagination, to think, rather than to just read, is the result of using an unreliable narrator. It forces them to participate, rather than simply observe.