Unreliable Narrators

I spoke about narrators a few days back, in particular about how I had some trouble coming up with one for this story. I still have some trouble, sure, but I also mentioned that a lot of the story is also narrated by one of the characters, telling a tale of his own. I'd like to talk more about that today.

He's pretty unreliable.

Unreliable narrator can be a great thing to spice up the story, with a caveat that I'd like them to be established as such very early on, their lies and deceit brought out on the table right away rather than made into a twist at the end (the reasons for this might be worth another blog post later). It throws the whole story into question, forcing you to think about what is real and what isn't, scrutinize everything that happens, compare it to other things, and quite potentially come to great many different interpretations of truth that could make for a great subject for debate if you and some friends have read the same work.

But there's another appeal in them that really gets to me - one that may have much less potential for deep and meaningful storytelling, but that instead is just plain fun. Because they work both ways: they make you doubt everything you hear in the story, sure, but by the same token they also completely throw away all the worldly limitations, laws, and rules. After all, you can't trust that the guy isn't lying!

Now, anything goes. There are no limits, because it's easy to just brush it all away as the narrator lying, embellishing things for effect, misremembering, or just having gone crazy. This story-within-story has no need to adhere to any limitations or to any obligations of being taken seriously. Now you can dive deep into fairy tale and fantasy, to a far greater extent than your setting and story conventions would normally allow - and in my personal opinion, you should! Go for the whole hog! Bring forth the weird, and the wondrous, and the utterly unbelievable! The high magic and monsters in a low-fantasy world! The spaceships and robots in a realistic crime fiction! The friendly tigers and ocean lightshows in a castaway survival tale! (Really, Life of Pi has a lot going for it for other reasons too.)

And at the end of the day, the final question is also reversed. An unreliable narrator can make you ask "How much of this was real?"... but it can also get you to wonder "How much of this was a lie...?"