464 – How to Use an Unreliable Narrator
The Mythcreant Podcast
Intro
This chapter explores the concept of unreliable narrators in storytelling, addressing common misconceptions and biases in critiques. The speakers stress the need for a shared understanding to differentiate between true unreliability and personal biases in character perspectives.
What if I told you that you can’t trust what this summary says about this week’s episode? Unless you can, of course. Whoa. This week, we’re discussing unreliable narrators and, specifically, how to use them in your story. We’ll discuss how you signal that a narrator is unreliable, why you might want to use one, and the reason so much discourse on the subject is useless.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is…
Wes: Wes.
Oren: And…
Chris: Chris.
Oren: And today, you shouldn’t believe anything I say. Unless it’s something you agree with and think is cool, then you should believe it. In fact, disbelieve the things you don’t like, and anything you do like, you can believe, and don’t worry about it. Because I am an unreliable podcaster.
Wes: Wait, I’m confused. Are we believing you or not? Or just…
Chris: That depends. Did you like the intro?
Wes: Oh, okay. I get it.
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: Yeah, so we’re talking about unreliable narrators this week, and the “unreliable narrator” is probably the most weaponized literary term I’ve ever encountered in various discourse and comment sections. Things like “in medias res” and “character-driven” come close. But I think unreliable narrator has to take the cake. Just because of how hypocritical it is used. Because, any time we critique something, they’re like, “No, that didn’t happen”. Some comment will show up and say that. Because it’s an unreliable narrator.
Chris: Any point of view is unreliable. If you have a character, and they have a point of view, clearly it’s an unreliable point of view. What even is reality anymore?
Wes: That’s such a horrible take.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: The reason this matters to me, beyond what an unreliable narrator actually is, that, not only is that viewpoint dishonest, and you can tell it’s dishonest because they don’t apply it to the parts of the story that they like, or that we agree on. Those are mysteriously not unreliable. Those we can rely on.
I’ve had commenters tell me in the same comment, “I can’t believe what this character said, so this point is illegitimate, but I can believe what the same character said a chapter later, and therefore this other point I made is illegitimate”. This is not an uncommon interaction. Beyond being dishonest, this is a corrosive mindset. Because we cannot discuss anything if we cannot agree on a frame of reference. A geologist cannot debate plate tectonics with someone who thinks rocks are a myth.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: We have to be able to agree on the basics, and this is not difficult in most cases, so I’m not actually expecting anyone is going to stop doing this because I made a podcast complaining about it, but I am hoping that maybe people who are not doing this on purpose or see it happening in reality will be able to understand better what’s happening.
Wes: You can hope so.
Chris: We will explain what an unreliable narrator actually is, because any normal point of view of a character has some level of bias, but that is different from an unreliable narrator, and you can’t use that bias to just dismiss things that happened in the story as though they didn’t really happen.
This is very similar, I think, to the point of view about authorial endorsement. And talking about when a main character says something, whether that is actually endorsed in the narrative or not. And a lot of people who don’t want to think that it is because they don’t want to be responsible for what their main character does. Or, can’t their main character just be a person and that’s just their character? Look, there are very practical reasons why we have to believe the main character the majority of the time. Storytelling just doesn’t work without that.
Oren: Now, we’ve talked some about what an unreliable narrator isn’t. Perhaps we should talk about what an unreliable narrator actually is.
Wes: My quick take on that is, an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose version of events do not match stated facts in the book. And those stated facts are best when they come from other characters, but just other things that kind of contradict what they’re saying. And it needs to be consistent. That’s it. Anything that suddenly makes you question what you’re being told is a good example of that. It’s not just somebody who’s walking around lying all the time. Robert Chambers’ short story, The Repairer of Reputations. It’s a great story. I won’t… Well, I guess I’ll spoil it a little bit.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Wes: He thinks he has this crown locked up in a safe in his basement that he will wear when he rules. And basically, this guy comes in to bring him something and says, “What are you doing with that piece of garbage?” Just casually, offhandedly mentions the fact that the safe is made of cardboard and the crown is made of tinsel. No agenda. Nothing there. But suddenly you’re like, “Oh, wait, what?” [Chuckles] Just subjective reality clashes with the narration you’ve been told thus far.
Chris: And I think that’s the important point. Objective reality, stated facts. A normal narrator has subjective opinions, but they’re obviously subjective opinions, which are distinctly different from things that are objective fact, that we would not expect a person to have a slightly different opinion on.
People don’t generally have different opinions about whether there’s another person standing there or not, for instance. Yes, there can be some conditions that can cause different opinions, but that would be considered unreliable as opposed to whether somebody is attractive or not. Which is obviously a subjective opinion.
Oren: The example that I love to use is the character of Lucy, from Lockwood & Co., the books. Lucy is extremely biased, because she has a nuclear powered crush on Lockwood, one of her coworkers. So everything Lockwood does in Lucy’s mind is amazing. And when they hold hands, it’s the bestest handholding that has ever happened. No one has ever held a hand that well.
Wes: [Chuckles]
Oren: So obviously, that much we can raise our eyebrows, take that with a grain of salt, that’s a subjective opinion, but the fact that they actually held hands is not in dispute. Now, I’ve seen some people get up on the idea that because there are plenty of studies showing that human memory is very faulty, and that people will truthfully claim that things happened, that objectively, because of recording devices that we have now, we know that they did not happen. So that is real, but I’m going to tell you that it’s not a good way to write your story most of the time.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Chris: The narration is not… actually supposed to be 100% realistic stream of consciousness.
Oren: If you ever write character dialogue and you don’t write it the way people actually sound, because then it would be hard to read, you understand why.
Chris: [Chuckles] Sometimes people do get caught up a little bit, especially when it comes to exposition. “Oh no, is this exposition something my character would actually think?” It just has to not interrupt the reader experience.
Wes: Save your dialogue for that.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: And, of course, there are a bunch of different ways that a character can be unreliable for a number of reasons.
Chris: If I can just add one thing about that. When we’re talking about objective fact, the way that this works is that the author has to do something, just like Wes was saying, another character, to call into question what the narrator says. That’s the other thing about this. Why we can’t just be like, “This person is unreliable because maybe those things didn’t happen”. What is the evidence in the text that is wrong? Has another character made a statement? Has some other description contradicted it later? There has to be something.
And just like when we’re talking about authorial endorsement, if a main character states an opinion and the author doesn’t do anything to show that it’s wrong, that has authorial endorsement. Similarly, if we hear about something that’s supposed to be objective fact or some event that happened, a thing that was there [Chuckles], and we don’t have anything in the text, the author has done nothing to call that into question, we need to trust that it’s there.
And both for the same reason. Because nobody can spend an entire book constantly questioning every detail. We have to take things as they are in order to understand and experience the story.
Oren: You can’t spend the entire story playing the “what is true” game. If an unreliable narrator is well used, you can spend parts of the story playing that. But the whole thing? What’s the point of even reading it then? These aren’t even words. These are just letters on a page. I don’t even know that they mean anything.
Wes: Disagree. That’s edgy and clever.
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Laugh]
Wes: You just don’t understand me, Oren.
Chris: Is it a zebra?
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Chris: Or a crocodile? Or whatever? Yeah, I’m thinking about City in the Middle of the Night. We had a podcast about that book where there’s some very interesting word choices. [Laughs]
Wes: It’s true. A buffalo with giant teeth.
Chris: It’s a buffalo that swoops out of the air in a second and eats half of a person.
Wes: What a funny way to not be unreliable, but just be confusing for no reason. [Laughs]
Chris: [Chuckles]
Oren: Yeah, that book confused me in a lot of places. The book opened with the protagonist being thrown out what I thought was an airlock onto a planet that was locked in a tidally locked orbit with its sun. So one side is always facing the sun. And I just assumed such a planet wouldn’t be breathable. And the story never mentioned that it was. And so I was so confused why the character wasn’t dead. It took a while to realize there’s supposed to be a breathable atmosphere there.
Wes: [Chuckles]
Chris: And for anybody who’s not familiar, that was a case where it was supposed to be an alien planet and there were supposed to be alien wildlife. And the names given to the alien wildlife [Laughs] …A lot of times we didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of description of the wildlife, like the buffalo. I don’t think that she ever described what the buffalo looked like.
Wes: Yeah, winged teeth. [Laughs]
Chris: [Laughing] Only that it definitely did not behave in a way you’d expect a buffalo to behave. Whereas we got some description of the crocodiles and it was like pincers and things, things that crocodiles do not have. That was a wild ride.
But that wouldn’t necessarily be unreliable narration because there was no expectation that the narrator was trying to create a cohesive narrative that turned out to be wrong. It was just… confusing. Which actually, that is a tricky distinction. I think it is easy to try for unreliable narration and end up with confusion. We can talk about that more later.
Oren: And I would say that the essential quality of an unreliable narrator, because you can get it all to these weird edge case scenarios of “Is this character unreliable? Is that character unreliable?” I think that what matters most is the feeling that you cannot trust them. Or at least you can’t trust them completely.
In Wes’s example, that’s definitely true. Because this guy thought that this thing was a crown and someone else came and said it was a piece of trash. One of them is wrong. We don’t know who it is yet, but obviously, there’s something weird going on here. Wheras opposed to something like the novel Piranesi, which I love, and I saw people calling it an unreliable narrator…
Chris: No.
Wes: What? Okay, I just recently finished reading that book and that makes me mad.
Chris, Wes: [Laugh]
Chris: We can understand why they think that. I have to beg to differ.
Wes: Okay, fine. Dracula. All of them are unreliable narrators.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Wes: All of them. Every single one of them. Van Helsing, biggest liar there ever was. [Laughs]
Oren: That I’ll believe. I subscribe to Wes’s theory that in The Final Problem…
Wes: Oh, yes. Holmes and Moriarty. They’re the same person.
Oren: Yeah, Moriarty is just made up. Holmes invented him. That’s my theory.
Wes: Holmes is just telling Watson these things and he’s the most unreliable narrator there is.
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Laugh]
Oren: The reason people say that about Piranesi in this case, I do not think is malicious. I think it is just because they see a character who thinks things that are obviously wrong. He thinks that there are only, what, 72 people in the world or something like that.
Chris: No, he actually thought 72 was a really, really high, impossibly high number.
Wes: A huge number. Yeah. [Chuckles]
Chris: No, he thinks more like 15 or something like that.
Oren: He thinks that there’s 15 people in the world and that this weird labyrinth that he’s in is where he’s always been from and that 2016 is a fake date. He thinks things like that. So, I understand where that thought came from, but I don’t think this character is unreliable in any way that matters because, he’s very honest about what he sees and he tells us his biases right away. And so, there’s never a moment when you’re reading through him where you’re like, “I don’t know if I can trust what this character is telling me” because he’s… Partly, he’s just so earnest.
Wes: You nod at this. You open a book and there’s a conceit that you’re just going to trust the narrator. Otherwise, like Oren said, the story doesn’t work. And you experience so much of Piranesi’s world right away, you trust him. And then when he’s confronted with new information, he deals with it appropriately. He doesn’t just… I don’t know. There’s room for growth and we see that.
Chris: Right, we see what logical conclusions he comes to and often they’re wrong, but we know exactly how and why he comes to that conclusion, what information he’s working with, and it never leaves us in doubt about what actually happened and what reality is. We see that his conclusions are wrong and he doesn’t understand reality, but we do.
Wes: Which is actually just better examples of dramatic irony. The audience understands things that the character doesn’t.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a classic example of it. Anyway, Piranesi, great book. Go read it.
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: I don’t think you’re going to get that many examples of all three of us agreeing that a book is good.
Wes: It’s fantastic. It’s so good.
Oren: So hopefully that means something.
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: But okay, so on to actual unreliable narrators. Usually this happens because of either some kind of narrative premise where the narrator is allowed to be dishonest. Usually they’re retelling the story. It’s either epistolary or some kind of less stated retelling narrative. Or, they have some kind of magical curse or head injury or trauma or something that affects their perception. And you can mix and match those a little bit, but those are your basics.
Chris: Whereas you wouldn’t normally have unreliable narration that’s from an omniscient narrator. Because omniscient narrator doesn’t have to tell you everything, but the assumption is that they will tell you the truth [Laughs]. Otherwise, it doesn’t have the characterization that adds to unreliable narration. It would just be a storyteller telling you wrong facts and then like, why are you messing with me?
A storyteller is what it would be like if it was to happen in omniscient. So we do need a character that has some issue that causes them to be unreliable. So it’s a retelling narrator usually or epistolary. Or it could be in the moment if the character has some kind of condition.
Oren: Right. If it’s an unfolding narration and the narrator is unreliable, it almost certainly should be because something is skewing their view of reality rather than they are intentionally lying. Just because someone intentionally lying in an unfolding narration is just kind of…
Chris: Doesn’t really make much sense because it’s what the character experiences in the moment. They’re not talking to anybody.
Oren: Who are they lying to?
Chris: Who are they lying to? And you can see instances where in unfolding narration where the character is in denial, but usually what would happen is they would still perceive things correctly and then they would just come to an incorrect conclusion, just like Piranesi. They wouldn’t just see things wrong because they’re in denial about it, for instance.
Wes: And just withholding information does not make a narrator unreliable. Require more than that for this definition to work.
Chris: I suppose if they withheld something that you would obviously say in that context. Where it’s a lie of omission.
Oren: Yeah, I suppose if it was something really big, someone came in and shot someone in the scene where they could see it and they didn’t tell you that happened. I guess that might count as unreliable. Maybe.
Chris: They tell you that somebody punched them and neglect to tell you that they punched that person first [Laughs]. It’s technically possible, but it would really have to stand out.
Oren: Now for the lying concept, authors like this one because it allows them to do a special kind of turning point more easily. That is usually the realm of… TV and film, which is the hidden plan turning point. Technically you can do hidden plans with a reliable narrator, but they get contrived really fast.Whereas an unreliable narrator, you can lie more easily. But I would say that you really want a bigger reason than that. Because making your story unreliable just so you can get a specific turning point is a huge overkill. You’re spending way too much for not enough gain.
And a story that does this pretty well is the story Code Name Verity. Spoilers for that story. Because this entire story is about information and concealing it. Because the protagonist is doing an epistolary story where she’s being interrogated by the Gestapo during World War II because she’s an allied spy. And so at that point, the motif, I guess, the story is largely about what she does or does not tell them. So that feels like an appropriate place for her to tell lies. And for those lies to be important in how the story is resolved.
There’s another novel that I read for my whole extravaganza of unreliability, which was called The Thief. And in that one, the thief just doesn’t tell you why he’s trying to steal this thing for the entire book. So there can be a big reveal of, “Oh, actually, I was working for this different person the whole time”. So what?
Chris, Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Chris: Yeah, that sounds more like a meta mystery.
Oren: And, technically, the thief can lie to you. It’s a retelling. So it’s technically not breaking his narrative perspective. But it, A: Kind of doesn’t feel like anything at the end. And it has a weird side effect of, the thief just goes through the entire story without a motivation. And I think the author was just hoping you would ignore that part.
Chris: I would say similar to Code Name Verity, you could have a Rashomon-like story. Rashomon is the classic movie that retells the same events from different perspectives. And everybody has a slightly different version. And it’s like a murder mystery.
And so lots of stories have then used this technique. And again, some of the basic premise is about the fact that these perspectives clash. And that’s the central premise that gives you a reason to do unreliable narration. But also, it gives, when there’s authorities there, any kind of interrogation or people could be held responsible for what happened, we automatically have a motivation for the characters to lie. And you are preparing the audience for potentially unreliable information. Which is important, too. Because what you don’t want is for people to think that your unreliable narration is a mistake.
Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because it can look like a mistake. At that point, it almost doesn’t matter that you did it on purpose. If it looks like a mistake, it will give the same negative effects as if it was just an accident.
Chris: Similarly, if your character is supposed to be under the influence of something, they have a condition, they’re being influenced by magic, or Cthulhu [Laughs], or whatever. Setting that up, and then showing that they are being influenced becomes more important in some way.
Or setting up a premise like Annihilation, the first book of Area X. It’s another book that has some good unreliable narration. And we set up that there is a weird Area X where weird things happen ahead so that we understand the cause of the discrepancies.
Oren: So then there is the more open-ended version of an unreliable narrator, which is the tilted narrator, for lack of a better term. The one whose perceptions of reality are off in some way.
And this one is weirder. Because I’ve definitely encountered at least some readers who just enjoy that feeling for its own sake. For whatever reason. I’m not one of those readers. So for me, it has to be in service of something like The Haunting of Hill House. I really liked the way that Shirley Jackson used the fact that we couldn’t really trust everything that the main character was telling us to help enforce how weird and disorienting this house is.
Chris: Right. And that one was very general. Instead of one thing that is specifically unreliable, there’s a general context where a lot of things are unreliable. And we also get the sense that we’re not sure what is reliable, what is not reliable. So you can do a broader experience of questioning more of the narrative. It should still be targeted so that it’s not just exhausting. So it actually adds to the experience.
Wes: What’s good about that one, too, is as it gets closer to the climax the unreliable events start to amplify, too. Because the narrator’s getting worse. That’s good. It builds appropriately.
Chris: Right. But that one also has a specific moment where there’s a turning point where the main character gives into the house. And after, that’s when her perspective really becomes unreliable and really feels like she’s being influenced. Now, earlier, there were things like some people heard bang noises. The other people didn’t hear.
Oren: Yeah. And the cold spot that they measure.
Chris: But that’s more like mysterious phenomenon. It’s less like unreliable narration. And then once we have that point that really identifies, OK, this is why her narration and her perspective would start becoming unreliable.
Then we get into things that are a lot more subjective. They cross that boundary between objective fact and subjective opinion where she thinks other characters are plotting against her and things like that. And she starts to read their body language in ways that suggest that they are more malicious. And things that would not necessarily be… most people could tell. So there is some subjectivity there [Chuckles]. But on the other hand, you’re not really sure if people are actually mad at her or if she’s just imagining they are.
Wes: What I remember really enjoying about that part was the dialogue. You’re looking at the words those characters are speaking are arguably pretty neutral or even perhaps some concern. But then immediately how the narrator starts to describe, draw insight from what they are saying, colors how you’re reading it. [Chuckles]
It really is a fun part where it’s just, “OK, evidence here, seems neutral statement, seems like concern”. Narrator says, “Hold on, let me step back in here and make sure that you know that these people are after me”.
Chris, Wes: [Chuckle]
Oren: There is, of course, a kind of elephant in the room when it comes to these sorts of stories is that people often want to make it either a parallel for or just straight up an example of someone who is not neurotypical, or who has a mental illness, and I’m not going to say you should never do that. I know at least some people who talk about feeling validated from that kind of story.
It’s not like a “never do it”, but I would be very cautious and I would specifically avoid this trope that I’ve seen in a number of these stories, which is the, “Oh, look how scary this weirdo was and how they murdered people”. You expect that in older stories, but I was reading a story called White Cat, which is from just a decade or so ago, and it started with the same thing. It was like, “Here’s this autistic-coded boy and he seems very nice and cool and polite, but he brutally murdered a girl”. It just felt like I was being invited to salaciously see how that had happened.
Now, to be fair, spoilers, I mentioned this in the article, there is the reveal that he didn’t actually kill her and that this was a lie planted in his head, but that reveal honestly feels more like it’s just there to preserve his likability and it still feels like we are trading on the same trope up until that moment. I was supposed to have this kind of voyeuristic interest in how this kind of person could be a murderer. I’m going to trust that was not the author’s intent, but it was really unpleasant. And I just do not like to imagine someone who doesn’t realize that’s what’s happening reading this book.
Chris: I do think that in those situations, an accurate and respectful depiction just has to come first. I won’t say that you shouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t say that you should never use neurodivergence for novelty, but a respectful depiction has to come before maximizing that novelty.
So Area X, one of the things that I really liked about that one, and this is pretty early in the book, where it’s a clear and very interesting instance of unreliable narration, is the narrator refers to something as a tower. And says that she’s looking at a tower. And then you find out that this tower is a hole in the ground.
Oren: [Chuckles]
Chris: And it ends up being really cool because what it is that this alien presence in Area X kind of copies things. And so there’s a lighthouse elsewhere and this hole in the ground that is a vertical hole in the ground that inside is a copy of the lighthouse tower.
And so it indicates her weird connection with this presence in Area X that she sees it as a tower. We hear other characters refer to it as a tunnel, so we know that there’s some discrepancy. And then we actually have it described [Laughs] and it is not a tower. In Annihilation, we have the Area X influence and she’s also not candid about the fact that she’s, has at some level been infected.
Oren: Eh, she’s fine. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Oren, Wes: [Chuckle]
Wes: That is a good kind of, as a reader, you get checked. You’re like, “Okay, here’s this weird premise”. And when she called it a tower, that was a moment of “What?” Immediately there, it was described as something else and you’re just like, “Okay, everything’s weird”. [Laughs] We can’t trust this stuff. So I thought that was good.
It’s the power of an unreliable moment like that, can show how it can be worth it, but it’s tough. Just to really be able to check the information in a powerful way that keeps your interest and doesn’t make you just disregard everything about the story.
Chris: I will also say that book has a moment where she discovers the leader of their exploration group has been hypnotizing them. And rewriting their memories. And when she discovers it, she’s now immune to it. But it definitely raises the question of how often this has happened before.
And it’s one of those “the ground moving under you” moments that is part of the point of unreliable narration. So it’s nice, but it doesn’t actually make you go back and question everything that happened because the things that happened before really aren’t that important, but it still gives you the sensation of not exactly knowing what’s real. So that was another nice moment.
Oren: All right. I think, what is real, unfortunately, is that we have come to the end of our time here on this podcast.
Chris: If you found us reliable and not unreliable because we said a bunch of bad things you don’t like, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing, very reliable patrons. First, there’s Callie MacLeod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week. [Outro Music]
Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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