Here's a sample of what we're doing in my classes with the Hudson Valley Writers' Center. This session of the yearlong Year of Your Book series focuses on tuning in to the voices in your story.
Below: Why every good narrator's voice is "unreliable," with some short prompts to explore this in your own narrator or point-of-view character. What do they know? What don't they know? How can your story tell more than their voice is able to say?
Tuning in to the voices in your story: Week 3
The Unreliable Narrator
There are various possible/useful definitions for this term, which was coined by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961.
In the most narrow sense, it means a first-person narrator who lies or tells a clearly distorted version of the truth. That’s the definition that was first conveyed to me in graduate school.
One of my favorite examples of this type of obviously unreliable narrator is the protagonist of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.” His first words to the reader are: “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”
Right away we’re made aware of the existence of a “you” who says the narrator is “mad,” which holds us in the tension between his insistence that he’s sane, and the knowledge that someone else thinks he isn’t. That only lasts about a minute: he quickly starts sounding so out of touch with reality that most readers will judge for themselves that he’s “mad” by the end of the second paragraph. (And things just get crazier from there as the story goes on.)
There are other types of obviously unreliable narrators: those who lie or leave things out on purpose, which we may discern right away or not learn until the end of the book. (E.g. the narrator of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.) Those who are meant to be read as naive or limited in understanding. (Huckleberry Finn.) Those whose points of view are meant to seem abhorrent (the speaker in Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?” — see below.)
But, as I’ve looked at this question through the years, I’ve come to think the idea of a narrator’s “unreliability” is a useful lens for almost every story— that the voice of almost every well-drawn, three-dimensional narrator is, in their own way, “unreliable,” which is to say they are fallible and human, and the narrative consciousness of the story holds this knowledge of their fallibility, and conveys it to the reader.
To explain this, let me explain what I mean by “narrative consciousness” versus the point of view of the narrator.
In Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?”, we only hear from the first-person narrator. In fact, we never hear a non-racist voice in the whole story, not even secondhand through something that someone else says within his hearing, for example. So the point of view of the narrator is pure racism. But when you get to the end of the story— even though his is the only voice you heard— you don’t feel that racism is good. You may even see it as more evil and insidious as before. The narrative consciousness of the story is aware that racism is an evil, and that is what it presents that to you. The narrative consciousness of the story is larger than the small, bigoted consciousness of the POV character, who can’t see that his actions are wrong.
But this principle, of the narrative consciousness of the story being larger— giving you more information— than the narrator can give themselves, is at work in almost every good story. An favorite example of Frank Conroy’s (late head of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) was a moment from The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The dignified narrator doesn’t tell us what he’s feeling about his father’s death--he talks only about attending to the details of his work— but then he notes that his employer, Lord Darlington, “Stevens, are you all right? . . . You look as though you’re crying.”
Here, the narrator doesn’t tell us that he’s feeling grief. The narrator only tells us he cares about his job. But the story tells us that he’s crying. The narrative consciousness is aware that he’s attending to his work with extra concentration to avoid breaking down. It passes that awareness to us. Even though the narrator may lack it, and even though we’re only seeing the story through the eyes of the narrator.
This makes the story three-dimensional. It makes it feel complex and nuanced in a way that it would not if the narrator were completely “reliable” and just stated everything exactly the way the story wanted to present it. To do this, the narrator would have to somehow be able to be objectively right about everything. That sort of voice doesn’t feel real, because it isn’t. Everyone is an unreliable narrator because they have their own particular way of seeing things and expressing things, impressions they want to make, things they want to hide from others, from themselves. This is true of us humans and so it’s true of good fictional characters, too.
The one sort of narrator that is really meant to be reliable is the omniscient narrator. This voice is presented as having no particular prejudices, secrets, peculiarities, or personality. The consciousness of the story cannot be larger than the narrator’s voice because the narrator’s voice is all-knowing. It is infallible.
I think this is a problematic concept. But that’s another discussion!
It might be worth noting, though, that if you’re trying to write in an omniscient voice and the story isn’t working, then getting closer into your character, and finding their personality— the things that give them a particular and unique point of view—their “unreliability”-- can often make the story come alive in new ways.
It’s also useful to think about the unreliability of all point-of-view characters, not just first-person narrators. The protagonist of Emma Cline’s “White Noise” (discussed last week) is a clear example.
Exercises:
1) Think of a scene in your current work. Maybe one you’re working on now, or would like to revise. Think about what that scene looks like to the point-of-view character.
Set the timer for five minutes and list three things that are happening in the scene that the POV character doesn’t know, or can’t admit to themselves.
— (If you come up blank, try this: write the scene from a different person’s point of view, making sure to show something they see that the original POV character does not.)
Set the timer for ten minutes, and start to write/rewrite the scene, holding this knowledge. Let it work its way into the scene in whatever way it naturally does.
2) This one is really simple: Set the timer for ten minutes and write a scenario in which someone walks up to your POV character and tells them how they look. That’s it.
-Does this tell you anything new/useful about your main character?
-How did your main character take this? Do they agree or disagree with the other person’s assessment of them?
Just bringing your attention to these issues can help broaden your perspective and show you where it’s possible for you/the story to see things beyond the borders of your POV character’s knowledge.
—
Optional readings:
“Where is the Voice Coming From?” by Eudora Welty.
We hear the story only through the voice of the first-person narrator.
“Only hate has a voice in this story; morality is silent. The burden of judgment is imposed on the reader. The story is haunting because that burden is still ours; these views still haunt our country,” writes Casey Cep in The New Yorker.
“Sweetness” by Toni Morrison
Using the concept of “unreliability” in the broader sense discussed above—meaning the story is telling us things beyond what the narrator states, that the story’s consciousness holds knowledge that the narrator may not—do you see that principle operating in this story? How? Does your perception of the narrator change as the story progresses? If so, how?
