The Unreliable Narrator Should Not Be a Crutch

If you’re looking for a hot take on current events, you’re not getting it here! So move on.

Did you know Aaron Taylor-Johnson is in the movie adaptation of The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke? Because I didn’t. I also ended up down a Wheel of Time rabbit hole, having found an archive of Robert Jordan interviews. RAFO is a fantastic author answer.

Presently re-reading a book I had to read for my freshman history class on volcanoes and the Bible. It makes sense in context.

A lot of Assassin’s Creed games are on sale in the Ubisoft store, and in other outlets like the PS Store, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. 

The Unreliable Narrator Should Not Be a Crutch

[I had a different topic outlined, but I feel like that is too broad, and I’ll touch on it when I re-read I Shall Wear Midnight anyhow.]

In fiction, there’s a device known as the “Unreliable Narrator”. It’s when the person telling the story, or the one framing the story you’re reading, watching, or playing, is… well, unreliable. If it’s a first-person narrator telling the story, for instance, he or she might have an interest in telling the story in such a way that makes the protagonist look good: more courageous, more attractive, more intelligent, whatever. Or it could be because of other reasons: the narrator might be drugged, or confused, or insane, which obviously tampers with how a person sees events.

It’s an interesting device because we implicitly trust the narrator to tell us the story as it was. But of course, people aren’t always like that. They often tell anecdotes to make themselves look better to their audiences. Or they misremember, and fill in the gaps (unconsciously or not) with what makes sense to them. Mind you, they also don’t generally tell out detailed, novel or movie-length narratives when they’re recounting things, so you’re always going to run into realism problems with fiction.

When used effectively, this can be incredibly interesting! One way to accomplish this is to go into the narrative ensuring that your audience knows this is unreliable. Baudolino begins our story with our title character telling the guy he’s talking to that he’s always been a compulsive liar. There are also segments of Eco’s novel Foucault's Pendulum in which the character is tired, sick, and possibly drugged–so what he sees may not be real.

When it’s not used well, it’s generally made into an excuse for why the author doesn’t have any consistency, or changes the canon every so often. Assassin’s Creed does this sometimes–the framing device is that the historical stories are all being looked at by people in the modern day, and the main antagonists are the ones with the big corporation, Abstergo. Every so often, we’re given an explanation as to what happened to one character after the events of a game, hidden in Abstergo files, only to have it retconned as, “Well, actually, Abstergo lied, it happened differently.” Which makes you wonder why Abstergo would lie in their internal memos?

It’s transparently a lazy retcon, one that makes you question if it’s worth reading any information in the series. If the writers will change it at the drop of a hat due to an Unreliable Narrator, why are you reading or playing at all?

Another frustrating example: Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The first two books are mostly consistent, but the narrator of the second book experiences some very strange things–which might be explained by him having been insane. That provides an odd outlook on the novel, and makes the reader question how much of certain details were real–a legitimate question when one of the villains is heavily implied to be the Devil himself. Except then the next book answers the question with, “None of it. None of that last book happened. He’s just a crazy person.” And proceeds to say that the previous book is a bit pointless, because its events were the ramblings of a madman and then writes over it with completely different events.

And for the record, that second book, the one retconned out of existence? That’s the one critics liked best, as far as I can tell. Makes me scratch my head.

To be fair, this sort of retcon can be pulled off in a way that doesn’t completely suck–if you limit its range. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings actually do this with the One Ring. In the original printing of The Hobbit, the way Bilbo gets the Ring from Gollum is different from how the events are told in the sequel. This is explained by the original book being written by Bilbo, and him not telling the full truth. That said, once Tolkien made this change, he released a re-worked edition of The Hobbit (the version you’re more likely to find) that tells the “true story” about the riddle contest with Gollum.

Now, if Tolkien had kept this up, if he had kept changing major details of what happened in The Hobbit, and repeatedly told you, “Actually, it all happened differently!” then that would be a pain in the butt. Because it makes you feel like the book you had just read was pointless. Why would you read a book in a series if you know the author is going to change the game on you, and try to invalidate the experiences you had?

I’ve been struggling a bit with this problem while watching Mr. Robot. It’s got a lot of sharp commentary, but part of the concept is that the main character is mentally troubled, and partway through the first season, you find out a big twist that changes how you perceived a lot of the previous events. From there, the second season gets weirder–there’s one episode that starts as a cheesy 90’s sitcom, much to the protagonist’s confusion. Now as the series goes on, before things get really weird, you have hints that something’s not adding up, and you know that it’s a possibility that Elliot is hallucinating. But it also makes a frustrating viewing experience because you don’t know when the rug’s going to be pulled out from under you again.

We’ll see how season three goes–if it gets too strange for me, I’ll give up.

The Unreliable Narrator can work! But with limitations. And you can’t just change things willy-nilly, because then you’ll lose your audience’s trust and attention. We have no investment in a story that doesn’t care to be consistent, using only the flimsiest excuse as to why not.

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