Narration: Truth or Dare?

Every story has a narrator – a voice or view that is expressed. Whether it’s from first, second, or a third person perspective, a story generally follows characters through a series of events. These events are told to us, the outsider, and allow us to live vicariously through the characters experiencing them.

But have we ever stopped to ask if we should believe in our narrator?

If you've seen the films Fight Club or American Psycho, then you are aware that relying on the main character’s perspective does not always result in the story being told truthfully. The audience is lead to believe one perspective is factual, but it is later revealed to be false. This is what we call the unreliable narrator – one whose view is anything but credible.

Your mission in writing an unreliable narrator is to lie. Lie hardcore. You need to be that voice telling us that magic is real and in the last five minutes of the film telling us, “Hey, so they actually used science to fake magic and death, which allowed them to escape society to live together in the woods.”

(See above film, it’s fantastic)

There are other films that use the unreliable narrator and tell you point blank that you might want to keep an eye out on this plot because it’s going to get weird, really fast. This includes mind-benders like Inception, Pan’s Labyrinth, or The Grey. The audience isn't told what happens, but is instead left with an open ending. This is basically a slap in the face, a taunt to the audience, and the cruellest effect of unreliable narration. You may drive your audience insane with the need for justice, but you will have succeeded in creating an unforgettable tale. You need to make your audience believe one thing and then be left with questions such as:

Is this real?

Wait, so did she create this all or was it true?

Is that wolf breathing or is he under it like in that Disney movie, Tarzan?

Maybe you don’t want them asking that last one, but you get the point. You as a writer are to be the puppet master. The audience is Little Red Riding Hood and you are the Wolf in Grandma’s clothes. They are the spoiled prince and you are the ugly witch that is going to curse his ass if he doesn't pay attention. Now fly, my pretties, and be the devious narrators we were all meant to be. After all, who has fun being reliable, anyway?

[Further things to check out: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (book), Welcome to Night Vale (Podcast), Stoker (film), Forrest Gump (film), NBC's Hannibal (TV show), American Horror Story (TV show), or go watch any news program - they're full of questionable narrating fun]

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.