The Unreliable Narrator
The unreliable narrator is a common technique in fiction, although some would argue there are many examples in non fiction as well.
As a former journalist I am very familiar with the need to try and look at the vector of what people say. You have to think about not only what they say, but why they might be saying it. There is a convention in journalism that there are two sides to every story, but I always found there are as many sides as there are opinions on what happened. I also had to bear in mind that finding an opposing viewpoint wasn’t always useful in telling the full story – sometimes the first person’s account was pretty accurate and finding someone else who disagreed may just be distorting rather than clarifying the truth.
Since I started writing fiction I have tried using both “reliable” and unreliable narrators. I can’t claim the success of Gene Wolfe who was the master of this (in the Book of the New Sun trilogy his narrator has a perfect memory but tells the story as he experienced it at the time so includes his own misunderstanding of what was happening at the time) but it is certainly a fun thing to do. In one story I deliberately included a narrator who was either a compulsive liar or a sociopath (the symptoms are the same) being interviewed by the police so the reader has to work out how much, if anything, of his story is true.
In many cases the narrator simply lacks the maturity or self knowledge to tell the truth. In others they are deliberately trying to mislead and crime fiction has some great examples of this. Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd where the narrator id te murderer (sorry, spoiler) is the most famous but in my view the best is The Face on the Cutting Room Floor by Carson McCabe. It starts with the Christie trick (spoilers again) but then has the murderer giving a second version of events as a suicide note which is also called into question by a second narrator who may have their own reasons for calling doubt on the facts and distorting what actually happened.
Of course, the central thread of any crime novel is for the detective to determine which of the suspects/witnesses are lying so the extension of the deception into the narrator is logical.
It is easier , in some ways, in comedy, as it adds an extra level. The self deluded character is the essence of high comedy and Wodehouse’s Mr Mulliner stories have a narrator who is a fisherman and who would be expected to exagerate. I have used it in my club stories which are a homage to both Wodehouse and Maurice Richardson’s Englebrecht stories. The narrator of the story within a story is oblivious to his own self aggrandisement, self deception and prejudices. At some point I will write one from the viewpoint of the “villain” of the stories who is, of course equally self deluded.
Of course, I could just be deluding myself.
