![]() In some cases, such as in the novel, Of Women and Salt, she thinks the presence of more than one narrator whose understandings of the same story don’t always align, helps reveal the impossibility of entirely reliable narration. Staci offered some different thoughts about multiple narrators. Vicki also came away from Gone Girl with a bad taste in her mouth for unreliability - although she’s still trying to figure out if that reaction stemmed from the fact that both narrators were unreliable or that both were, as she put it, “awful people.” Both narrators recounted their stories in first-person and both were untrustworthy characters and narrators. She told me reading Gone Girl certainly didn’t help. The flip side of Cindy’s willingness to more easily trust an omniscient narrator is that she more easily mistrusts a first-person account. After all, their purpose in sharing their writing is to share their unique perspectives. On the other hand, Cindy, Vicki, and I agree that when it comes to memoirs, we’re likely to believe the narrator’s intention is to be reliable. ![]() As I was discussing Lolita with my husband and Staci, we agreed that the nature of its theme - centered around an obsession most readers would consider abhorrent - could have made it easier to perceive its narrator, Humbert Humbert, as unreliable. ![]() Perhaps content and themes are stronger factors in our perceptions of reliability. Jenny, who writes both narrators who are intentionally unreliable and ones who try to be reliable, told me that as a reader, she prefers unreliable narrators because she enjoys the opportunity to “engage at a deeper level with a story and feel like I’m a part of it instead of just a passive bystander.” Jenny cited the realist literary title, Lolita, as an example of an unreliably narrated story that invites readers to think more deliberately about their own value systems. My husband and our friend, Staci, who also both read a lot of realist fiction, told me they relish an unreliable narrator, too. ![]() Barbara from What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, for example, left me thinking more deliberately and questioning my own notions about aging, betrayal, and the moral complications around discovering someone else’s explosive secret. Cindy told me that it’s become exhausting and distracting to have to constantly question narrators instead of simply enjoying the story.įor me, as someone who almost exclusively reads realist contemporary or literary fiction, an unreliable narrator feels much more rare - and I love running across one, simply because of the contemplation it provokes. This might be because she’s been reading so many thrillers, a genre that’s embraced an unreliable narration trend in titles like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and My Sweet Girl among others. Cindy told me that she’s been craving more reliability in narrators recently. Do Factors Like Genre, Themes, and POV Affect Our Perceptions of Reliability? GenreĪlthough genre doesn’t necessarily determine whether a reader will or won’t perceive a narrator as reliable, I discovered that sometimes genre affects readers’ desire for reliability. Omniscient narrators, she explained to me, don’t have any stakes in the storyline, which means they don’t have a need to manipulate facts in order to promote an agenda. While all of us agreed that reliable narration is a reader’s perception about the narrator’s intentions, my friend Cindy told me there is definitely one type of narrator she perceives as more reliable: an omniscient one.
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