CC BY
55SECTION 3 FORUM FOR DEBATE
Catherine Brown Oxford University
Unreliable Narrators
In Footpath-1 we published an article by Natalia Deryabina: ‘Unreliable narrators and translating The Remains of the Day ‘. In Footpath-2 we published an article by Karen Hewitt: ‘Who - or What - is an Unreliable Narrator?’ In Footpath-3 we published an article by Catherine Brown entitled simply Narrators ’ which included a section on the unreliable narrator, Engleby, in Sebastian Faulks’ novel of that name. In these articles the authors discussed whether individual narrators are honest, deceitful or self-deluded, and explored how we might decide from textual evidence.
Here, Catherine Brown extends her discussion by relating the concept of the unreliable narrator to the nature of narration itself.
Reading texts critically is something that we do all the time. But the word criticism, which etymologically is related to words meaning ‘making distinctions’, itself fails to make the distinction between analysis - and critique, or negative judgment. Reading unreliable narration involves the second. Any systematic critique, of course, relies on analysis - but the impulse to perform this critique will arise from an impression, a feeling, that we are not the reader desired by the text. The desired, or implied, reader is competent to understand the text - through sufficient knowledge of the language and subjects concerned - and is also sympathetic to its perspectives. A feeling of
discomfort arises when the distance between the actual and the implied reader is large - especially if the actual reader is clear that the implied reader is not one which he or she wants closely to resemble. One might take the example of a transcript of a seventeenth century witch trial, which assumes in its readers a belief in the existence of witches, the necessity for their punishment, and the justice of the legal process by which they are identified as such. From such a text a post-seventeenth-century reader is likely to feel a sense of detachment which limits her discomfort. The problem arises with works which rhetorically serve an argument which she rejects but believes to be controversial - or accepted by many readers.
For example, in Ian Fleming’s From Russia With Love, a senior officer in SMERSH is introduced to the novel in the following way: ‘A toad-like figure in an olive green uniform which bore a single red ribbon of the Order of Lenin came into the room and walked with quick short steps over to the desk. General G. looked up and waved to the nearest chair at the conference table. “Good evening, Comrade.” The squat face split into a sugary smile. “Good evening, Comrade General”. The Head of Otdyel II, the department of SMERSH in charge of Operations and Executions, hitched up her skirts and sat down.’ This is orchestrated for maximum effect. That effect relies on the assumptions that neither heads of intelligence organizations, nor people with toad-like figures and squat faces are women; the overturning of these expectations aims at generating surprise combined with amusement and intensified disgust at the squat figure, which is the more repellent by virtue of being a female. What I have just made is a feminist critique of the narrator which receives no endorsement within From Russia with Love. This novel is not unreliably narrated.
The American critic Wayne C. Booth gave the following definition: ‘I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not.’
The implied author is another concept which bears Booth’s stamp. He makes a helpful distinction between what he calls the FBP
- the flesh and blood person, the implied author, and the narrator. For example, Atonement is written by the male FBP, Ian McEwan, born in Hampshire in 1948. He is, like us all, infinitely complex, but we can infer certain things about him from his authorship of this novel. He or she (and we can’t tell which from the novel alone) seems to know a fair bit about English literature, and about which kind of English was read in Cambridge in the 1930s. He is ready to spend several hundred pages dwelling on a woman tormented by guilt for a childhood crime, is prepared to spring a major narrative twist on the reader, and has considerable skill with the English language. All of these things are true of the implied author also. But in addition, the implied author believes the British retreat from Dunkirk was a shambles, thinks it wrong maliciously to accuse someone of rape, and considers it appropriate that someone who did this should spend the rest of their lives tormented by guilt. In other words, McEwan has to know and do the things we find in the novel, in order to have written it - but he doesn’t have to share his implied author’s values. Maybe he privately considers that the retreat from Dunkirk was a rather glorious moment for the British with their little boats. And finally, we have his narrator, who, we discover in the final section, is Briony Tallis, who has hitherto been narrating herself in the third person. So the FBP Ian McEwan has created a fictional FBP, who has written a novelized testimony from which another implied author can be extrapolated. But from what we can find out and deduce about McEwan, Tallis, and their respective implied authors, all four of them are largely in accord. Admittedly, the criticism of the narration of the highly-wrought opening section (discussed by a ‘well-known critic’ in the novel) opens up a slight distance between Briony the FBP, and the implied author of that section of the novel. Also, Briony’s novel deviates at the end from fact, as she confesses. But she justifies this as a kindness to the lovers and the reader - to let them survive and love; the actual FBP McEwan presumably justifies this, and the subsequent revelation of the narrator’s unreliability, as part of a moving examination of guilt and grief. That is the only major difference between them.
Characteristic ‘young male’ unreliability can be found in
works by relatively young males. The Rachel Papers was written by Martin Amis when he was twenty-four, and is narrated by a man on the eve of his twentieth birthday, describing his life over the previous year. Charles Highway studies English literature, is bright, neurotic, and despises most people. The situations in which he involves himself often make him look ridiculous, and his descriptions of the world are clearly limited by his narcissism. He is factually reliable but his account of the women he desires demonstrates an overweening male ego and wit from which the novel as a whole distances itself only to a limited degree. Beyond this, any given reader might wish to laugh more with than at him, whereas another, who is possibly more likely to be female, is suspended between pity for the narrator, dislike of the implied author who does not condemn him more, and transferred dislike of the flesh and blood author who created that implied author.
Something of the same is true of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, narrator and protagonist of A Catcher in the Rye. He lacks the intelligence of Engleby or Highway, but shares their neurotic contempt for most people. He is expelled from school for poor performance, runs away from his family, has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute, gets beaten up, nearly runs off with his sister, and finally accepts that he is sick. He ends up in a psychiatric hospital - but he has become a hero and icon for generations of teenagers. They are not misreading the text. It is possible for a narrator to be very young, naive, self-destructive, and arrogant, and for sympathy for him not to be prohibited by that text’s rhetoric. The same is true of Alex, ultra-violent teenage narrator of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. He is extremely dangerous but is verbally dextrous and, to this reader at least, more charismatic than any of the above.
The narrative voice can be undermined by features of the text which it produces - factually, or ethically, or both. A narrator whom the implied author suggests is contemptible might tell the reader the truth, like John Self in Martin Amis’s novel Money; one whom the implied author suggests is good might understand less than the reader about what is occurring, like Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield.
So likeability cannot be correlated to reliability. The connection
of goodness to idiocy needs no rehearsal in Russia, home of the Blazhennyi or, Holy Fool. In England too we are aware of the connection between a loving, trusting disposition, and a failure to perceive evils or dangers in the way that most people do. This is shown in the way we developed our word ‘silly’ which derives from the Germanic ‘selig’ or holy, vi good, to naive, to foolish and trivial. The narrator of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers stops short of foolishness, as does Pickwick himself: but they are limited in their understanding and boundless in their trust. The supposed editor of The Pickwick Papers opens: ‘The first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers.’
His readers, if their taste in humour takes a certain bent, cannot but take pleasure from such an account - and the flesh and blood author, Dickens, is not so cruel as to shock such readers by presenting an ultimately tragic world through his narration. Rather, the novel resembles a painting in the naive style: knowingly naive, and benevolent in content: a garden scene, a street scene - not an accident, or a war.
The relationship between narrator and implied author can be examined in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited. This Second World War novel is narrated by a temperamentally moderate, rational, atheist Englishman who becomes fascinated by and involved with an eccentric, temperamental, aristocratic, Catholic family whilst he is at university. His narration introduces the reader to that family’s world. He, like most English readers of the novel, is not a Catholic, nor does he admire or share any of the different lapsed, hypocritical, self-tormenting, self-contradictory, or mindlessly conventional forms of Catholicism which the family members variously embody. Finally, a happy and passionate affair with the daughter of the house is brought to an end when she is recalled to a sense of guilt at living in sin. And yet, by the end of the novel a hole has been knocked in the protagonist’s atheism, and the reader understands that the novel’s
implied author is a Catholic apologist, who just happens to have made the circumstances of his apology as difficult for himself as possible. A firm atheist or anti-Catholic narrator will reach the end of the novel unchanged, and possibly without any sense that the narrator was unreliable - except in wavering at the end. The implied author allows such a reading. As such, the novel is unusual. Decent narrators, such as that of The Pickwick Papers, are rarely far distant from the novel’s implied values.
Narrators are not always protagonists. Henry Fielding’s narrators are typically outside his stories, (third-person narrators) and deliberately facetious. The opening book of Tom Jones is entitled ‘Containing as much of the birth of the foundling as is necessary or proper to acquaint the reader with in the beginning of this history.’ This is a form of unreliability, in the same way that a straight-faced comic telling a joke is unreliable. In this sense, many comic novels have tonally unreliable narrators. Pride and Prejudice opens: ‘it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ The implied author tells us: ‘This is far from a truth - but see how funny are those who, often for selfish reasons, tell themselves and each other that this is so.’ Such narrators have to get us on their side.
My favourite example of a facetious or mocking narrator is in Mr Noon, a novel written by D.H. Lawrence in 1921. The third person narrator acts for the implied author like an energetic, petulant, but ultimately benevolent schoolmaster, grabbing the back of the reader’s collar in one hand and frogmarching her up and down the page. When he addresses us as ‘Gentle reader’, as he frequently does, he is being knowingly sarcastic. He spends over a hundred pages immersing us in Mr Noon’s pursuit of a local Nottinghamshire girl called Emmie, describes how Noon is caught in flagrante by Emmie’s father - and then suddenly the section ends. Part Two of the novel is entitled ‘High Germany’. And the narrator makes this much immediately clear: ‘No, I’m no going to tell you how Mr Noon got out of the Eakrast bedroom; I am not. Eat the sop I’ve given you, and don’t ask for more till I’ve got up the steep incline of the next page and have declined
like a diminished traveller over the brow of the third. You’ll not hear another word about Emmie.’ He then begins to re-orientate us. For some reason Mr Noon is now in Munich. ‘I expect you are waiting for me to continue that the bedroom was a room in a brothel; or in a third-rate and shady hotel: or in a garret, or in a messy artistic-bohemian house where a lot of lousy painters and students worked their abominations. Oh, I know you, gentle reader. In your silent way you would like to browbeat me into it. But I’ve kicked over the traces at last, and I shall kick out the splashboard of this apple-cart if I have any more expectations to put up with. ’ He describes a very fine room, tells the reader to go and change into something which matches the finery of Noon’s new lodgings and then says; ‘Bow, gentle reader, bow across space to Munich, ancient capital of ancient kings, know to the British on the beautiful postage-stamps’. What neither the narrator, nor the implied author, will tolerate, is English provincialism, nationalism, or - three years after the end of the war - anti-Germanism. They castigate sentimentalism, prudery, squeamishness, and cowardice - just as do Lawrence’s other works, but never in so exuberantly bullying a mode. Given that this novel was left unfinished, and only published in 1984, the freedom with which the reader is bullied may have been inflected by Lawrence’s sense that that reader did not exist. Even this narrator, though, varies his tone. When he is most occupied with the developing relationship of Noon and the married German woman with whom he eloped, his tone is intensely serious. In ‘High Germany’ he only whips out his mock truncheon on a few occasions when it occurs to him to see if the hellcat of the reader is still there, paying attention, and getting the point.
In other works of multiple narrators, on the other hand, the unreliability of some is stressed and measured against the relative reliability of the most likeable or mature. For example, in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, Chapter 8, ‘Upstream!’, opens with ‘Darling - Just time for a card - we leave in half an hour - had our last night on the Johnny Walker now it’s local firewater or nothing - remember what I said on the phone and don’t have it cut too short. Love you - your Circus Strongman.’ What
follows are a series of postcards from an actor to his girlfriend back in England. He realizes as quickly as the reader does that his girlfriend, who doesn’t respond, is probably being unfaithful. What makes him unreliable is the fact that the implied author, who also created far more sophisticated narrators in the same volume, finds him unwise and intellectually limited.
Sometimes, however, the unreliability of a narrator is itself unreliable. Such cases require careful reading. In James Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’, one of the short stories in Dubliners, the narrator is one of two boys who spends a day truanting from school. Initially, the perspective seems to be that of a boy. The story opens: ‘It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us.’ ‘He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tine with his fist. Not, ‘he looked to us like some kind of an Indian’ or ‘he looked as we imagined an Indian to look.’ And yet at other times the narrative seems far distant from childhood. ‘A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together.’ The protagonist then handles rather well an incident in which an elderly man starts talking to him and his friend about girls, before disappearing to a corner of a field to masturbate. It turns out that such wisdom as is present in the text does not belong to the intermittently-present narrating adult, but to the young boy himself.
Then we have the cases which are difficult to determine A classic example is Tolstoi’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. Pozdnyshev certainly resembles an unreliable narrator. He is repellent, ‘every now and again he uttered strange sounds, as if he were clearing his throat or beginning to laugh, but breaking off in silence’. He is a murderer, and his proposal for reforming social morals would render humanity extinct. But the liberated lady, and the conservative gentleman, with whom he argues in the novella’s opening scene, are both made to look unsatisfactory. He knows his limitations, he has the last word, and the novella’s two epigraphs from Matthew - which have not been selected by him - both endorse his views on celibacy. Whether or not we read
Pozdnyshev as reliable, however, really depends on whether we find it credible that a flesh and blood person would create an implied author who holds these views. We know from Tolstoi’s extra-literary comment on the novella, that he held them himself.
Nabokov’s Lolita has generated a different kind of critical controversy. It is a brilliant novel in which the implied author gives us laughs at every line. But he also gives us hundreds of pages of the narrative perspective of a paedophile who, for at least the first part of the novel, is almost constantly in a primed state of lust. Moreover, the humour is that of the implied author, not Humbert himself. Readers’ reactions to the novel vary: some are queasy in the presence of paedophilic meditations. The supposed editor, editing the prison papers of Humbert Humbert, writes in his introduction: ‘I have no intention to glorify ‘H.H.’ No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! ’ The implied author is parodying this local unreliable narrator. So at what level is the narrative unreliable?
Nabokov is rather more direct in his non-fictional: ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita\ He claims that people felt let down because they expected pornography but found literature. He then goes on: ‘That my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert is quite true. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions’, which doesn’t address the point that the most stable readers with the richest sense of humour may find Humbert’s prolonged company, particularly in the first half of the novel, distasteful.
Nabokov is also responsible for perhaps the most spectacular case of unreliable narration I know: Pale Fire. This is a 999 line poem supposedly by an American poet named John Shade, copiously annotated by his colleague, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote reads the poem largely in relation to the history of the deposition of King Charles II,
the Belovced, of his escape from Zembla, and of a man named Gradus’s failure to assassinate him. However, a reading of Shade’s eccentric but otherwise undistinghished poem, gives one very little basis for such a reading. Moreover, Kinbote’s notes are self-serving. The point is that Nabokov has created an ontological conundrum which cannot be resolved.
It is a work which makes you reflect not just on literary criticism but also on the nature of fiction itself, and the rules which determine reality within it. And if we’re thinking in these terms, unreliability in a narrator can really be pretty broadly defined. Moreover there is an overarching unreliability in all fiction. Briony Tallis asks ‘how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?’ Likewise, how can a novelist determine what is unreliable? By playing God.
