Very unreliable narrators

[WillowRoseTile]

Does anyone else get really annoyed by unreliable narrators in books? I mean the ones where you the author shows you the inner thoughts of a character and their feelings but it turns out they were false?

I know it's just a silly thriller but I just read Never Lie by Freida Mcfadden and the plot twist which relied on unreliable narration made me feel like the author had just cheated.

@MsJuniper I just felt like the whole thing didn't make sense. These endless thoughts about how the estate agent couldn't have been there because otherwise she would have tidied up when Tricia knows that the estate agent hadn’t booked them to see it at all. Or those thoughts of oh my goodness do I have to spend another night here when will I be able to leave from someone who has chosen to be there to look for a dead body.

Unreliable narrators make a bit more sense when they are explicitly telling a story to the reader or to other characters in a story within a story. So they are speaking to an audience. Otherwise it's like you think you are listening to someone's internal monologue or thoughts but you aren't really.

And leaving the unreliable narration to one side it doesn't make much sense psychologically the idea that this total psychopath Tricia will be close to her family and have loads of friends and really love her husband (though she may want to kill him at some point) and her baby. And despite having killed lots of people she's so terribly scared and afraid of so many things. Psychopaths have blunted emotions and usually take risks / gamble / do adrenaline sports to provoke some kind of reaction in themselves.

Anyway like you say. Junk food fiction.

I think the unreliable narrator done well is good. So for example "The Debt to Pleasure" John Lanchester. I really like that book but he is a good writer. It isn't an excuse for bad / lazy writing I agree.

@BasiliskStare At some point when I have recovered from my annoyance I intend to read one of the recommendations on this thread for an unreliable narrator done well. For the moment I am reading a non fiction book.

Which one? There are multiple narrators.

Walter Hartwright, Heart Right my foot. Funny how he ends up in the big house a rich man after all.

i wouldn’t call either of those unreliable as such. Nelly is biased, and her eyewitness account of the events she witnesses is very obviously partial, often unsympathetic, because of her loyalties and dislikes, and the fact that she’s a servant supposedly loyal to her various employers, and because she’s trying to minimise her own involvement or culpability in events she presents herself as retelling objectively, but nothing she recounts as factual is actually contradicted by one of the other narrators.

Like the fact that she ends the novel saying she can’t imagine how anyone could imagine anything other than quiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth, which is obviously what she wants to believe. But it’s juxtaposed by the account of the child who doesn’t want to pass the churchyard because of the ghosts.

The unnamed narrator in Rebecca is interesting. You can read her as a narrator who speaks honestly, truthfully passing on her account of events, which is only made ‘unreliable’ by the fact she’s lacking key information and has constructed a version of Rebecca that is reliant on her subjective interpretation of the Rebecca/Max marriage which she constructs from clues she misinterprets. In this reading, once she has all the information, she’s no longer ‘unreliable’.

On the other hand, you could read her as only becoming more unreliable once she has Max’s self-justifying ‘confession’, where she accepts his account on no other evidence than that she wants to, and from the moment of her well-timed faint at the inquest, actively aids and abets the cover-up of a crime.

Kazuo Ishiguro uses the unreliable narrator frequently and well IMHO

SPOILERS
I read When we were Orphans for my bookclub and honestly it was the best bookclub book ever-by the end none of us even knew if any of the events of the book even happened. Fascinating as the discussion evolved.

I just finished Rebecca-which I have read numerous times over my life-and think interesting point about unnamed narrator.
Surely any narrator who is telling the story from their point of view is unreliable as they can't help but insert their own point of view and let it colour their observations and "their" version of the story.

I haven't read that book, but surely we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and that is what can make a book written in first person more human and thought provoking. The Remains of The Day is a fantastic example of an unreliable narrator.

And in a threesome, just like Wilkie Collins himself.

I think all narrators are unreliable to a greater or lesser extent and one of the joys of The Woman in White is how strongly differentiated the voices are. I agree we are suppose to believe Walter is more objective than some of the others but there's definitely points at which you have to question his version of events, e.g. was he a murderer?

The Nellie and the Rebecca narrator and the Remains of the Day narrator are all ‘unreliable’ (IMO) because they are for various reasons biased and subjective, although I agree that they are not deliberately doing this or describing things they haven’t seen.

Yes, and I think that is Nelly Dean, pretty much — in fact the scene where she justifies to Edgar Linton why she hasn’t told him Cathy is ill, starving herself and hallucinating in her bedroom for days, always reminds me of Mn threads where someone posts on AIBU and at some level knows their behaviour was at fault, but tries to preempt criticism by justifying it in their OP.😀

If Nelly Dean were on Mn, she’d be one of those who pride themselves on ‘speaking as I find’ and are quick to decry ‘snowflake’ behaviour.

I think the protagonist of Rebecca is different in that she’s differently unreliable before and after the key revelation (trying not to spoiler here for anyone who hasn’t read this terrific novel). She’s unreliable first because she fills in Max’s silence about R by deciding it covers an appalling grief at the loss of a perfect woman, and after the revelation, she adopts his self-justifying view of the situation, because it suits her, and most readers, most of the time, want her to succeed in covering up a crime.

Some critics do suggest that she’s a more manipulative or self-serving narrator even in the apparently ‘innocently mistaken’ first part of the novel, arguing that her construction of herself as naive, unsexual and clueless is designed both to appeal to Max and to disarm the reader ahead of her actions in the post-revelation part of the novel.

And yes on Kazuo Ishiguro — I used to adore his A Pale View of Hills, just on the grounds of unreliable narration alone.

Exactly about Walter. And his account of the expedition in Central America is so dodgy. Even when I was a teenager I though this is clearly made up, I bet he didn't even leave England.

I often wonder about the inner monologue of pathological liars. In any given situation someone like this e.g. Trump always plays the victim accusing their victims of exactly the sort of behaviour they display themselves. But how far do they believe the stuff they are saying? I often think liars like this know the factual truth but do feel the emotions. So perhaps they call in sick at work to say their grandma has died. Their boss is off with them guessing they are bullshitting again. They are genuinely outraged by this reasoning, well she doesn't know my grandmother hasn't died etc.

The other option I guess is lieing through omission. So it's been often said on mumsnet that people whose children have been taken into care will on social media focus on a single defensive aspect of the social workers report e.g. the house being a mess and leave our all the really serious things. And that's something they tell themselves as well as a self defensive mechanism.

I think though to be successful the unreliable narrator needs to feel psychologically plausible and not a cheap trick being played on the reader in the interest of introducing a twist.

Yes, we need to think the narrator is lying to themselves more than they are lying to us.

I love an unreliable narrator - I'm utterly gullible, and suspend disbelief very obediently, so if I guess it, I'm thrilled at my own brilliance, and if I don't, it's a great surprise.

Rachel Walsh, the narrator of Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes, is a good one - you start to realise after about a quarter of the way through that her version of reality might not be completely accurate. Like her friends, the reader sees the truth long before Rachel does, and you're waiting impatiently for the penny to drop. When it finally does, the emotional impact of her journey back to herself is so much greater because you've seen the extent of her delusion, and understood the reasons for it.

The narrator Maud in Elizabeth is Missing is an interesting version of an unreliable narrator as she knows she has memory problems. We only hear her interpretation of events, but can imagine the other view of the other characters.

I really enjoyed the book, haven’t seen the screen adaptation.

I must say this thread is giving me lots of good reading ideas

Oooh I always yell 'dirty bird!' When I think an author is cheating.

I have just finished never lie and completely agree. It would still make no sense on rereading . I will certainly give FM a wide berth in future . It was badly written but I could have f

Forgiven that if it made sense .

I just finished The Bee Sting, where the story is largely told from the individual perspectives of the four main protagonists. It’s fascinating how unreliable they all are when you hear another’s perspective. They also manage to lie successfully to themselves and rewrite their own histories to paint themselves in a different light.

Have just read Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh and have come away scratching my head at most of it. It's loosely based on a real event, but it's not clear whether any of the events from the main protagonists POV are true, partially true or the ramblings of a sexually frustrated woman with MH issues. It's quite an annoying book. It's a shame because SM writes really well.