UNRELIABLE NARRATION

I’m going to own up.  I am a reading addict, and I love unreliable narrators.

As a bookworm child, I always believed that the storyteller had the answer- that if I read the book carefully enough, I’d know what to think and know all the answers.  Moving through study as far as sixth form, I realised that wasn’t quite the case.  The book which first alerted me to the phenomenon of the unreliable narrator was The Great Gatsby.  Reading the book for the first time, I developed a kind of tragic crush on the narrator, Nick Carraway, identifying with his status as bystander, observer, but not protagonist.  Gradually, as I understood the book better, I realised that Nick’s version of events is precisely that: Nick’s version.  He may not be a main driver of the plot, but he has opinions of the other characters and of events, and those opinions colour how he tells the story, and thus… there was an almost audible ‘ping!’ as the lightbulb went on in my mind, and everything I’d ever read made a whole new kind of sense.  

I particularly enjoy books which have a multiple narrator structure, giving the flawed, unreliable points of view of several different characters, and setting the reader the irresistible puzzle of piecing together the truth from the various biased accounts.  I have fond memories of a novel called Happenstance, by Carol Shields, which has to be read in two halves, telling the same story: you read one character’s account first, then turn the book upside down, go to what had been the back but is now the front, and read the whole thing again from another perspective.   The story is of a relationship, told from the perspective of each partner, and reading it delighted me.  I love diary-style novels too, or books in the epistolary form, with the story told through episodic letters, emails, texts…  piecing together what really happened from reactions, minor details, and unreliable accounts.

So much for what I read: as an avowed book addict, I would say I enjoy a narrative quirk, wouldn’t I?  As someone who at least attempts to teach Literature, it would be a bad job if I didn’t recognise style and strategy and flawed perspective.  So: what’s so good about the unreliable?  Why does the ‘third person omniscient’ not satisfy me as much?

I could make light of it, saying it’s because I’m not one of those slightly scary people who refers to herself in the third person, and because I know I'm definitely not omniscient.  And maybe it really is as simple as that.  It sounds glib, jokey, and facile, but maybe that’s just it.  I certainly don’t know everything.  The older I get, the more frequently I ask myself whether I know anything at all.  Certainly, it often feels as if other people’s opinions and motivations can be a giant secret.  I could mention some extremes, such as the farmers who appear to select the morning rush hour to drive their tractors really, really slowly on main roads, keeping frustrated commuters late for work, or those people who invade your personal space in the supermarket, elbowing you out of the way to reach for the last courgette.  Or how about those people who look you up and down and sort of ‘huff’ silently to themselves: is it even possible to start to know what they’re thinking?  Perhaps it’s best to remain ignorant, at times like that: knowing everything would probably instantly transform all of us into the embodiment of the exploding head emoji.  

I’m so often a bystander, an observer, seldom a protagonist.  I’m the kind of person who should ‘measure out my life in coffee spoons’, except that I drink Americanos, with ‘no room’, making coffee spoons redundant.  I so often struggle to read social cues, to figure out what others really think of me.  When I’m paid a compliment, I’m almost always astonished that someone found something good to say about me; I never expect people to find me likeable, or good at anything I do.  I just expect people to think I’m a nerd- my nose perpetually in a book, Kindle, tablet, phone, whatever comes to hand, peering through my ever-stronger glasses to try to figure out a character, plot, or theme.  A lifetime of anxiety makes unreliable narrators of us all, second-guessing everything that’s said to us, reading between the lines for double meanings, which may be unintended; overthinking in overwhelming oversensitivity, overwrought, overnight, and over and over again. 

I might not have much use for coffee spoons, but I do measure out my life in emails, texts, and posts.  There are the photographic chronicles of my frequent walks: ‘sea spam’ as I fondly term them, given that my walks are so often at the coast.  There’s my daily Wordle score, mostly tweeted just after midnight, and often my last posting of the day.  There are the many, many messages I send and read.  Pieced together, they would tell a tale of silly jokes between colleagues; longer and more heartfelt messages to friends I seldom see; brief, practical exchanges of domestic minutiae; the seemingly endless timeline of business-like exchanges about work.

I measure out my life in blog-posts, too: the semi-secret double life of writing, which goes deeper than my fairly quiet work persona.  What I write in these blog posts is always true.  Or at least: I think it’s true.  I think I’m giving a true account of my life and observations, but really… can I truly judge?  I am the unreliable narrator of my own life, always unaware of dramatic ironies ahead, usually doubting my every move, sometimes missing the impact of my own words, and occasionally stunned by how a plot, theme or character turns out.  

So: I admit it.  I’m drawn to unreliable narrators.  Anyone who’s too sure, too omniscient, or does that scary thing of referring to themselves in the third person: I just don’t share their confidence. I’m piecing together my narrative by the moment, hour, day, month, year.  I’m using my unreliable narration to make sense of it all.  To find a pattern, if there is one, or simply to observe what I see along the way.  

The beautiful, tenacious sea pinks, growing on the side of cliff faces during May, catch my eye each year, and feature in my sea spam in their season.  I’m sad each June when they fade, but anticipate them again in another year.  Even when the narrative is uncertain, the patterns form in the end.  And I love unreliable narration precisely because of this: because it represents the humility of not knowing all the answers, leaving the patterns to form, and the conclusions to be drawn. 

Because even the most unreliable narrator makes sense some of the time.