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Lies, All Lies

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Mighty Ponygirl suggested Alias Grace after dirtygirlfromill from Midwestern Transport started a sidebar about Lolita. I nominate The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, and Time’s Arrow (although it might not count, since the narrator is not exactly disingenuous).

Who’s your favorite unreliable narrator?

52 thoughts on Lies, All Lies

  2. Jane Eyre. All about supporting her “dear master”….or is she?

    Hah! My English lit professor had a theory about “Jane as Christ figure” that was really amusing. It is true that anyone who mistreats her comes to grief.

  3. Yeah, my students love that Christ figure thing, because they all love Jesus. Somehow I can’t convince them to see her as more of a vengeance demon.

  4. Re: Jane — hehehe! In that vein, I’d like to nominate Oliver Twist. He says he’s an orphan. I suspect he’s a cold-blooded killer!

    Actually, Atwood’s newest The Penelopiad is another unreliable narrator. We listened to the book on CD a week ago and it was an interesting intersection of gender and class as told by Penelope (Odessyus’s wife).

  5. The title narrator from Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club.” The novel, not the film. The lack of sleep shows up in Palahniuk’s writing, and through all these subconscious slips in the prose, one see the character’s depression, doubt, and even latent homoeroticism laid bare. Everything in the story feels like it’s being viewed through six inches of glass.

    Also, the narrator in Dosoevsky’s Notes from Underground is another classic example. Constant only in his utter contrarity, Dostoevsky’s alter ego in this manuscript is a stark testament to social engineering gone awry. Even now, he’s a topical model of alienation amongst bourgeouis intellectuals in modern urban settings.

  8. That Jane Eyre thing cracked me up.

    But how on earth could anyone beat Humbert Humbert? I mean, the whole point of this discussion is lost on me, such admiration have I for his making.

  9. The narrator from Remains of the Day is certainly one of the least reliable narrators I have ever come across. The emotional struggle that takes place within him, only visible through the reactions of others, makes RotD a very poignant novel, if you can get through the narrator’s obtuseness.

    Freeman, have you ever read Dostoyevsky’s The Double? (There needs to be some sort of conference to get an official spelling of Dostoyevsky in English.) It is pretty much Fight Club as written by Dostoyevsky. Again, a very unreliable narrator. It is guaranteed to confuse you at some point.

  10. Good one! That part where he talks about reading the housekeeper’s letter over and over and over? So depressing. You want to hug him and belt him at the same time.

  11. All of Atwood’s narrators are unreliable. It’s her favorite trick. Offred in the Handmaid’s Tale is so unreliable that she backs up and retells her experiences 2 or 3 times and every time it’s a different story with a different point. What really happened is up to anyone’s guess. Atwood’s great obsession is the gulf between how we really feel and how we create an image of Self in our own minds.

    Humbert Humbert is a work of genius, but the best unreliable narrator of all time is Bertie Wooster.

  12. Mighty’s comments about how hard it is to tell who will read Lolita and pick up on the basic fact that it’s an unreliable narrator is an interesting one to me. I used to think that fairly intelligent people generally picked up on what makes a narrator “unreliable” fairly quickly. But actually, thinking about the Bertie and Jeeves stories, I’ve found that some extremely bright people I’ve tried to lend them to get frustrated quickly because you have to read them at all points in time trying to figure out what really happened through Bertie’s Cloud O’ Stupidity. And the frustration makes it not fun for them. I don’t generally have a real issue with it. I think the way to tell if a narrator is unreliable is to ask if it’s a 1st person narrator. If so, he’s unreliable by definition.

  13. Right, and a lot of the time she writes about people whose humanity is unacknowledged, who are locked out of subjectivity in a way that interferes with their sense of self, time, purpose, and–inevitably, therefore–narrative. Most of her narrators have been deprived of personhood in some way: Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale turned into chattel and surrounded by people who literally remember a different history; the bullied girl and unmoored woman in Cat’s Eye; the narrator in The Edible Woman who’s being alienated from her own body; the lone postapocalyptic narrator of Oryx and Crake; and Alias Grace with an audience who should not be acknowledging her as a person, let alone listening to her voice. It seems like all of these people have had to force their own small store of memories to stretch farther to cover confusion and loose ends, like turning a partial text into a religion. Offred is throwing out possible morals in the hope that she will receive an ending.

  14. After the internets, I have no faith in anyone’s ability to figure out that something isn’t being said with a straight face.

  15. And after all that, I can’t believe I left out Invisible Man. Weird. That book is at the top of my list of “meditations on narrative,” but I always forget that it’s an example of the unreliable narrator.

  16. And The Adventures of Augie March! And Everything is Illuminated! And Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close!

  17. Everyone gets so into what they think is the heavy-handedness of The Handmaid’s Tale, that I think what’s lost is the way it’s a meditation on the way life itself is open-ended and defies narration. Not just with Offred’s story, which doesn’t end so much as peter out and you never find out what happens to her. I’m in love with the remarkably sympathetic job she does with the character Serena Joy. Serena’s story to herself of her own life is hinted at, since her story basically ends with the revolution. But you piece it together—she imagined herself a brave warrior on behalf of Christianity and opposed to the evils of feminism and was so enamored of her own narrative to herself that it never occured to her that victory would actually mean the destruction of her own self-view as a strong, powerful, warrior.

  18. Right, and a lot of the time she writes about people whose humanity is unacknowledged, who are locked out of subjectivity in a way that interferes with their sense of self, time, purpose, and–inevitably, therefore–narrative. Most of her narrators have been deprived of personhood in some way: Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale turned into chattel and surrounded by people who literally remember a different history; the bullied girl and unmoored woman in Cat’s Eye; the narrator in The Edible Woman who’s being alienated from her own body; the lone postapocalyptic narrator of Oryx and Crake; and Alias Grace with an audience who should not be acknowledging her as a person, let alone listening to her voice. It seems like all of these people have had to force their own small store of memories to stretch farther to cover confusion and loose ends, like turning a partial text into a religion. Offred is throwing out possible morals in the hope that she will receive an ending.

    Don’t forget The Blind Assassin, both the narrator of the main story and of the story-within-a-story.

  19. Damn, I love The Blind Assassin.

    I think the best unreliable narrator has to be from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I love that mockery of the glowing, starry eyed biographer.

  20. Is listing “postmodern unreliable narrators” cheating? I mean, they’re playing off the assumption that all narrators are inherently unreliable, calling attention to said fact–then trying to trick you into thinking they’re conventionally fallable unreliable narrators, when they’re in fact conventionally unreliable unreliable narrators.

    Fascinating topic, but I’d like to add a wrinkle:

    Should we differentiate between narrators who know they’re unreliable and are trying to hoodwink their audience (Fight Club) and those who don’t and are being hoodwinked by their author (Lolita)? If so, does that make any difference in how we evaluate the novels? Because it should, I think, influence whether Humbert Humbert is the object of general or general and authorial condemnation; and if it does, those who scorn Nabokov’s “pornographic” novel can be declared, definitively and forevermore, not to “get it.”

  21. Favourite unreliable narrator? Definitely Ralph Trilipush in Arthur Phillips’ The Egyptologist (with the detective Harold Ferrell, in the same book, a close second). Brilliant book with one of the most darkly twisted and comical endings I’ve read in a while.

  22. I don’t know if the narrator is trying to hoodwink the audience in Fight Club, though. At least, that’s not how I read it.

    How about the multi-voice narrator in The Virgin Suicides?

  23. I don’t have my copy of the novel anymore, so I’m relying on the film than it, but isn’t the book also narrated retrospectively? If it is, at the very least the author’s withholding information, manipulating us via omission the whole way through; if it isn’t, then I have a faulty memory and it’s a Thursday evening.

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  28. How can 30 responses have gone by without a vote for Huck Finn? Benjy Compson would also get a vote from me.

  31. I was just going to toss Faulkner out there. Benjy is definitely unreliable.

    And since my field is poetry, I’m also gonna toss out just about every narrator in The Canterbury Tales.

    Should we differentiate between narrators who know they’re unreliable and are trying to hoodwink their audience (Fight Club) and those who don’t and are being hoodwinked by their author (Lolita)?

    I think the way to tell if a narrator is unreliable is to ask if it’s a 1st person narrator. If so, he’s unreliable by definition.

    I’m inclined to agree with Amanda, but I need to wrinkle further:

    How does one handle narrators that don’t know they are unreliable and it’s also apparent that they author is not trying to hoodwink the narrator? “The Yellow Wallpaper” comes to mind. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an argument that the narrator is unreliable in this instance. Are there levels of unreliablity? Is there a point where one understands that theoretically a narrator is unreliable, but for interpretive reasons it’s absurd to argue that the narrator is unreliable?

    Also, what about 3rd person narration? There’s always “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge.”

  32. Third-person unreliable narrator is my favorite, usually handled through the sorta-cheat of free indirect discourse. It can do such a good job of implicating the reader….

  33. Has anyone read Talking it Over or Love, Etc., by Julian Barnes? He wrote a beautiful short story about a woman in a nursing home who would qualify as an unreliable narrator.

  34. There’s also the point where third person narration is still told from one or another character’s point of view, who may be unreliable. In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, the narration is third person, but it’s told mostly from the point of view of Scobie, the Commissioner of Police who commits suicide at the end of the book. And he’s unreliable. From his own point of view, he’s a basically decent guy, whose main motives are a sense of pity and responsibility, and his wife is a terribly burdensome person. At a couple of places in the book, the wife is seen through other eyes – first the eyes of another man who is in love with her, and later a priest – and she’s a different person. And over all, I get the sense that there’s a lot more pride and desire for control in Scobiie’s “pity” and “responsibility” than he’d be willing to acknowledge. He wants his wife and his mistress both a level down from him.

  35. Also, what about 3rd person narration? There’s always “An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge.”

    I had a lit professor tell me the narrator in “Occurance” wasn’t unreliable. Can’t remember her reasoning off-hand, though. She gave me a poor grade because I didn’t follow the ultra strict format requirements (one paragraph for intro, one paragraph for explanation, one paragraph for conclusion, and that’s all you get) for the sake of making the paper not read like something from remedial high school English.

    That’s probably what I get for putting off my 100 level lit courses until the last semester of college…

    Charlie in “Flowers for Algernon” has always been one of my favorite unreliable narrators. It’s chilling how he goes from innocent stupidity to full comprehension and then back again.

  36. Me, I’m fond of the entertainingly, wildly, deliriously unreliable when it comes to narrators. For this, you can’t do better than Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children.

  37. I guess the heart of the matter is how you define an unreliable narrator — Amanda’s right; any story told from the first person perspective is naturally going to be biased from that person’s pov. But does that automatically make it an “unreliable” narrator? For example, in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, the narrator is without a question operating on an agenda, describing what happens from his own POV, and I think that any person could maintain a reasonable doubt as to his true motivations. But does that necessarily make him “unreliable” in the way that Grace or Penelope or HH are? After all, HH tells us, without any ambiguity, that Lo seduced him. (Hence, I’m sure, the coining of the term “Lolita” in our culture to describe the girl being the predator rather than the prey). With Grace, she actually admits to the reader that there’s a good chance she’s lying. With Penelope, the chorus of maids call her to the carpet on her “version” of the story. But Fowler lays all the cards out on the table and says “look, I made my decision for reason x, not y” (I dont’ want to spoil it), and it’s up to the narrator to decide if they believe him or not, but he’s not obscurring all of the possible reasons for doing what he did.

    For my part, I’m going to assume that a narrator is more or less playing straight with me, just biased from their own POV. The difference, of course, is whether or not I feel that they are leaving out, obscurring, or outright fibbing about a vital bit of narrative to the story.

    For example, if someone told me that they got up this morning and went to the store, I wouldn’t take them to task for not telling me that they first ate breakfast, showered, dressed, and spent a minute reading the paper and call them an unreliable narrator. But if they omitted the part where they ran over a clown en route to the store, I would consider them unreliable. If they said “I didn’t run over a clown on the way to the store” when they are in fact, telling me from prison where they were serving a sentence for bozocide, I would consider them unreliable. HOWEVER, if they said “I may have run over that clown. It’s a blur. Did I run over the clown? I don’t think so.” I wouldn’t consider them unreliable in that I would still trust that they were more or less playing straight with me. It’s a very difficult nuance to explain, because it’s all about semantics and deconstruction and I hate that. If you add to that my own feelings about clowns, maybe I’m more inclined to believe that it really was an accident and not a malicious act of clown-bashing.

  38. Damn your ivory-tower, high-fallutin’ literature!

    Roger “Verbal” Kint from The Usual Suspects.

  39. There’s a really good essay at http://www.bitchmagazine.com about Bridget Jones as unreliable narrator (or at least there used to be, they’ve since changed the site’s format).

    It’s amazing how many people took Bridget’s description of herself at her word without taking into account that we are reading her Diary which is a reflection of her most insecure thoughts. For example, a friend and I both saw Bridget as one of those women who’s not fat, but think she is. Yet she was universally described in the media as fat.

  42. It’s almost too obvious to bother bringing up, but how about the narrators in Rashamon?

    I’d always assumed that the reason that everyone in Jane Eyre who gave Jane trouble came to grief was because it was a revenge novel: Bronte’s life as she wished it had happened. I must admit it never occured to me before that it might be the narrator causing all the havoc…

  43. The unreliable narrators who make me laugh the best are all of the clientele of H. Bustos-Domecq’s jail-cell detective Don Isidro Parodi.

  45. @43 Yes, the voices in Isidro Parodi are great.

    Nelly, in Wuthering Heights, makes me love Heathcliff in spite of everything.

    The narrator in Maupassant’s Le Horla.

  46. mersault: (There needs to be some sort of conference to get an official spelling of Dostoyevsky in English.)

    Absiolutely not. This God damn standardized orthography has already gone way way too far. Now no one carries a pencil anymore; everybody’s typing everything and it’s all coming out spell-checked in digitally-perfect standardized fonts How is one supposed to type slurred speech or regional or foreign accents if everybody spells everything the same with mathematically identical handwriting alla time? huh? These weird foreign names, best of all the ones transliterated from a different alphabet, are our last few chances to bust out. Hands off meerkat, I’m goin down fightin!

  48. Ok, I’ll throw out two:

    The narrator of Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell is awesomely hilarious.

    And how is it that no one has mentioned the governess from Turn of the Screw? That lady is super loco!

  49. my all time favourite is the unnamed first person narrator of daphne du maurier’s “rebecca”.

    when i was a young romantic impressionable teenager & first read the book, i completely did not understand the way that she, and the society they lived in, was shielding maxim from justice. it wasn’t until i re-read it as an adult that i realised there was more to it than a “happy” ending to an unconventional love story.

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  52. I can’t believe all those mentions of Atwood and not one of The Robber Bride – not one, but 3 narrators whose points of view of the same events and of each other don’t exactly mesh. I also second the vote for Remains of the Day. What about Life of Pi? Or almost all of Fay Weldon?

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