As part of my first-year undergraduate orientation program, we were assigned Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, a book ostensibly about childhood and growing up, lies and the destruction they can wreak.  Though it wasn’t my particular cup of tea at the time, I could appreciate McEwan’s prose, his ability to capture the tension, fear, and bewilderment of teenagers facing the prospect of growing up, and the hollow despair of an unjust turn of fortune.  I also loved the twist at the end, in which we learnt that the narrator of the book is an unreliable one, and that what we thought was true…wasn’t.

The concept of the Unreliable Narrator is not a new one.  Really, for as long as people have shared stories, they have toyed with the idea of truth and lies.  Aristophanes’ The Frogs, first performed in approximately 405 B.C. is considered the first use of an unreliable narrator, when Dionysus claims to have suck 12 or 13 ships and his slave later states that it happened in a dream.  Numerous tales in the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights, feature lies, fabrications, and exaggeration in order to make their point.  Many of these tales, however, are fairly up-front about their deceptions, showing the lies for what they are in obvious ways throughout the text.  Other examples of this can be found in stories where children are the narrators, misinterpreting the events around them, or when the books are told through the eyes of ‘madmen’, such as Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, which freaked me out so much that I have never been able to re-read it completely.

But there are times when things aren’t so clear-cut.  Other pieces use the Unreliable Narrator far more insidiously, guiding the reader into a false sense of comprehension and understanding, they whipping the proverbial rug out from under their feet.  Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger  is a classic example, taking the readers’ fundamental understanding about how mystery novels “work” and using it against them.  Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is one of the more heart-breakingly moving examples that come to mind, playing on the simple human desire to believe in the fantastic, especially if it offers a glimmer of hope, rather than the banalities of reality.

I personally love books with unreliable narrators.  It forced the reader to rethink the entire work, to rethink and re-conceive a narrative that, on the whole, seemed so simple.  I love that it re-emphasizes the beauty of fiction–talking about things that didn’t happen to people who don’t exist.  The unreliable narrator trope forces us to look at the man behind the curtain, so to speak, to see the puppet’s strings, to acknowledge that we are looking at a facade.  And, if it is done well, in realizing the un-reality of what they are reading, readers can often appreciate even more keenly the beauty of what they believed to be true, and to realize the depth of the relationship that can form between reader and author–people who, most likely, will never ever meet.

But, to my surprise, in a campus-wide discussion on Atonement, the president of my college talked about how genuinely angry she was at the revelations in the books’ final pages.  She felt cheated and painfully manipulated.  For her, and, indeed, for many, as I later learned, the idea of an unreliable narrator was seen as a betrayal of a fundamental trust; when they picked up a work of fiction, they trusted the author to tell “the truth”…even in the midst of a fabricated piece of work.  For many people in this discussion, the revelation of the Unreliable Narrator betrayed the basic premise of story-telling, and, on a grander scale, about why we tell stories at all.  It made me realize how powerful the bond between story-teller and audience truly can be; the act of reading a book implies, for many, an almost religious faith in the veracity of the story-teller, a fact which can often obscure the presence of the reader, their emotional or psychological investment in a story.  By exploiting that trust, the Unreliable Narrator forces us to acknowledge our own presence in the narrative, and our ownership of the characters, the events, and our feelings about them.  And while that isn’t always easy or comfortable, it makes us as a real part in the story…and that, I think is a pretty remarkable feat.

So, IF you who want to explore a few more tales from Unreliable Narrators, THEN here are some suggestions–along with those mentioned above:

Lolita: Perhaps the quintessential Unreliable Narrator of modern fiction, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is a liar par excellence.  In desperately trying to exonerate himself, Humbert implicates the reader of his tale by sharing with them his love (love?) for the teenaged Dolores Haze.  Strictly speaking, Humbert is a delusional, controlling, homicidal psychopath.  But in the pages of his confession (but for what crime?!), readers find themselves forgiving him, excusing him, and empathizing with him in a way that is difficult for many to accept.  This is also one of my favorite books of all time, ever, ever, ever, so if anyone wants to discuss, you know where to find me.

Oscar and Lucinda: Another of my all-time forever favorite books (because I am a book masochist, apparently), this story proves once and for all Peter Carey’s sublime genius.  Because he tells you on the first page what is going to happen, and still manages to dupe you into hoping, scheming, dreaming that the ending of the book will be different.  Oscar is the son of British minister, while Lucinda is the unexpected heiress of an enormous glass factory in Australia.  When their mutual love of gambling brings them together during a steamship crossing, the stage is set for one of the most understated and perfect love stories in literature, as well as one of the most awe-inspiring travel narratives you’ll ever read.

The Turn of the Screw: A truly creepy is-she-insane-or-not type of Unreliable Narrator is at the center of Henry James’ seminal short story.  This is also an example of a ‘found manuscript’ story, as the narrator is presenting a text written by someone else, in this case a deceased governess who was hired to care for a young boy and girl at a country estate in Essex.  Though the job at first seems a simple one, the governess becomes haunted by the tales of the houses’ former inhabitants, and ghostly presences that threaten the children in her care…at least, that’s what she says happened….