Your First-Person Narrator Has Issues

In reading Requires Only That You Hate's* 'Gallery of Beardhurt', I began to notice an emerging theme (beyond young, white, educated hetoerosexual cis-dudes moaning about how oppressed they are). In both the reviews and the comments, there is an absence of discussion about whether a first-person narrator with obvious Issues actually gives an accurate picture of either their fictional universe or of the author's views.

There are several elements to pick apart here. First, we have to see whether the character is an unreliable narrator. I'm of the opinion that any well-written first-person narrator is inherently unreliable, since they're filtering the events of the story through their unique perspective. But some narrators do more editing and filtering than others, and in more problematic ways.

Second, you have the 'don't try this at home' factor. These are characters who are deliberately written as dysfunctional because this generates conflict in the story. Although they can have wish-fulfillment elements, and can be fascinating characters, they are a reflection of something the author knows is not okay in the real world.

Finally, we have to look at the events of the story and evaluate how these match up to the narrator's interpretation. This can be fairly subtle, especially when you have a first-person narrator who imposes a lot of their own perception on events. But these outside glimpses of 'objective' reality can tell you what is actually going on in the story-- is there an alternative explanation? does this character have some ingrained prejudice?-- and how much is in the main character's head.

Whether or not the character is showing off the flaws of their own personality or of their social conditioning and world, or whether they are conveying 'reality' is the key difference between narratives which use unpleasant characters to convey the story's message and characters who are conveying they unpleasant views of the author.

*This is very much a 'snark as humour' reviewer of bad books. Read with this fact in mind.