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56Karen Hewitt Oxford University
Who - or What - is an Unreliable Narrator?
fa. Footpath No, 1 Natalia Deryabina wrote an article on linguis-. : ‘-sages that helped to define the 'unreliable narrator' in Kazuo Ishi-r -: i novel. The Remains of the Day. I was surprised to learn that she : : aadersd Stevens, the butler who tells his story in the novel, to be au anreliable narrator'. He is a troubled, inhibited man who hesitates :rT - een possible speeches or courses of action, but those very hesita-rscs show how capable he is of reflection and an almost painful r-j±ialness. So I wondered in wrhat sense a reader of this novel would e bo the conclusion that Stevens' narrative is unreliable, either fs-ac ~ jrsally or technically? I have been puzzling over this question to ■_ir rciinr of trying to sort out exactly what we might mean by an 'unreliable narrator. In an effort to make this article more accessible, I hr e illustrated my argument with examples either from well-known :lassies or from the novels available to you in the ORF project.
Most novels have a third-person narrator whom we must trust if r are to make sense of the novel. Jane Austen's narrator has an —anlc. vsiuy voice and strong opinions. She takes the reader into her Dzodaice. revealing to us when and why the characters misunder-raaia each other, so we can assess just how foolish or prejudiced or ~3e have been. As a reader, you make a pact with Austen's nar-ra::r. ;■ on read attentively, and she will guide you to true judgement. ¥: a do not argue with the narrator - although there is certainly space :::; : _ to think carefully about all the implications of what she is tell-zar } oc. IMs is why Jane Austen and other fine writers continue to laacfaare us: in the interstices of their subtle linguistic analysis we can al - a s rind something new. Of course you can disagree with the nar-raazr yuiside the novels, but in this case you are really arguing with Aassn herself- in other words, indicating that she has failed in some
way. That is a different discussion, since here we are considering successful uses of reliable and unreliable narrators.
As examples of other writers with a totally assured third-person narrator we can consider David Lodge in Nice Work and Pat Barker in Regeneration. Lodge makes jokes about the fictionality of his characters but then goes on to treat them as characters over whom he has complete control. When we are told: 'So these are the things that are worrying Robyn Penrose as she drives through the gates of the University, with a nod and a smile to the security man in his little glass sentry box: her lecture on the Industrial Novel, her job future, and her relationship with Charles - in that order of conspicuousness rather than importance...' we are in no position to suggest that Robyn was not thinking about these problems in that order, or that narrators should not make distinctions between 'conspicuousness' and 'importance'. Indeed, in this novel, Lodge-the-novelist and the narrator seem to be explicitly identical. And they know.
Barker is an intriguing case because she draws on so much documentation of real people. Can we object, 'I don't think Sassoon would have said that'? No, because the character called Sassoon is given fictional authenticity by an authoritative narrator. This narrator is much more detached in tone than Lodge, but just as reliable.
So an important distinction has to be made. You, the individual reader, may happen to agree with people like Mrs Bennett in Pride and Prejudice on how mothers should prepare for the future marriages of their daughters. Or, after studying Wilfred Owen's poems, you may decide that he would not have discussed them with Sassoon in the way he does in Regeneration. Those are your opinions but they have nothing to do with the reliability of the narrators of these novels. As a reader, you have to accept that Mrs Bennett is a silly woman whose pretensions are mocked, or that Owen has that precise degree of admiration, deference and poetic self-respect which he shows towards Sassoon in Regeneration. You can disagree outside the novel, but you will be misreading the novel if you think that your views somehow exist inside the novel as 'possibilities'. They do not.
The literary problem of the unreliable narrator almost always . - :-гі hen the novel is told in the first person. Whereas Jane Aus-: -ur¿-person omniscient narrator, for example, has a comfortable г аг :n the reader, the nature of the pact changes when the author ;ec res :: :jse a first-person narrator. From the first pages we have to ¿bis narrator as a character within the story. In Charlotte 5rrcs s Jsne Eyre we have an example of the reliable first-person іатз:~r - ¿he grown-up Jane who recounts her history as a difficult, ;: nc a passionate young woman. We must trust what she says: are :еТі so in tones which cannot be denied. Sometimes she in-- -jrpcczzss irtto her account some mild criticism of herself as a child.
- - - e io accept that too. But her version of what happened - a -: z- complicated version intensified with powerful imagery - is re :r_; version available to us. Charlotte Bronte does not tell us any-—: is separate from the attitudes and beliefs of her narrator-
Thae is a critical argument that subconsciously Bronte is tell-Г г ¿oerent stoiy - that, for example, Jane Eyre is determined to pmsa ±e aggressive male, even to the point of castration, for which 7-м'ester's blindness is a symbol. The evidence in the text is mini-r_i_ I: seems to me a wilful simplification of a much more intriguing isiessineni by Jane which is clearly in the text.]
The simplest kind of unreliable narrator is the villain in a de-: • e when he is explaining his version of events. We have to . r- : :ji which of the various suspects is to be trusted and which is r»x be misted. Each account is potentially untrue, so the interest es ir logical or imaginative testing of one narrative against another. : -grif caaily. all this uncertainty is contained within a wholly reliable zirrauve provided by the narrator and the detective who are either jienkal or who coincide in the triumphant last chapter when the truth ш isvsskd.
A classic example of an unreliable narrator in a sustained nar-e is Jason Compson in William Faulkner's novel The Sound and ■ -£ -: 7/. The novel is divided into four parts: the first part is told by idiot who can record accurately but who cannot reflect; the second
part is told by a hypersensitive young man who cannot escape from memories which cause him anguish. Hence, for different reasons, we can trust what they tell us. When Jason, the third narrator, begins his section, we are immediately in conflict with him: 'Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say’ is a crude judgement on any young woman. As the plot unfolds, we react to his justifications for cheating his older sister with outrage. Frequently he records a conversation and then comments on it in such a way that we are certain he has misinterpreted the intentions of the speaker. We are, as it were, continually passing judgement on Jason even though he is the narrator.
How does Faulkner manage this? First, he has given us a context in which to disagree; because we have already read the two earlier sections, we know more than Jason. Secondly, Faulkner's brilliant mimicking of a particular voice reveals Jason's bitter, malicious and distorted view of humanity. Jason is unreliable rather than a simple liar, because there is a kind of truth in what he says: this is the way he actually sees the world. The act of interpreting what he tells us forces us to negotiate between his 'truth' and the emotions and understanding we have lived through in the earlier sections. Faulkner engages us in such an energetic, exhilarating activity that a common response from the reader combines distrust and moral disapproval at Jason with a strange sympathy for him: a wonderful example of what an author can do to develop and control very complicated emotions in his readers.
When he created his unreliable narrator, Faulkner provided a context which is 'reliable', and a narrator's voice which, in its tone and phraseology, is clearly untrustworthy. (Dickens did the same for the 'Miss Wade' section in Little Dorrit.) In each case, our interpretation is complex. The problem with using the term 'unreliable narrator' in much contemporary fiction is that very often there is no alternative reliable context against which to judge the narrator's version; moreover, the narrator usually speaks to us in a sympathetic voice.
Most of the first-person narrators in the ORF contemporary British novels are puzzled by their own feelings and uncertain how they should act on them. For example: Tom Crick in Waterland, Carmel in An Experiment in Love, Michael in What a Carve Up! and
Nicholas in Morality Play. Can any of them be described as unreliable narrators?
Waterland is a novel full of questions, of half-articulated impulses and retractions, of theories advanced, interpreted and shown to have real but limited validity. Tom Crick sees his task as explaining the events of his own life and those of his family in order to make some sense of the tragedy that confronts him - and the bigger threat that confronts the children he is teaching.
Why did fear transfix me at that moment when the boat-hook clawed at Freddie Parr's half-slipping, halfsuspended body? Because I saw death? Or the image of something worse? Because this wasn't just plain, ordinary, terrible, unlooked-for death, but something more? Children, evil isn't something that happens far off - it suddenly touches your arm.
All these questions are necessary, because each one takes him further and in a slightly different direction from the previous question. As readers we have to follow this curving interrogative line of the story. Tom does not at first know that he is going to tell his children about evil - but when he reaches that point he has the authority of someone who has learnt something important. His uncertainty does not make him an unreliable narrator because the reader is required to participate in his speculations, using the limited evidence that Tom possesses. The novel would collapse into an incoherent mess if we could not rely on the honesty of Tom's narrating voice to hold it all together.
Although Carmel is cannier and more merciless than Tom, her narrator's voice, like his, is that of an older person looking back at her youth. She describes, explains and scrutinizes; the reader's job is to follow a very intelligent person as she moves backwards and forwards, developing through image and episode, uncomfortable judgements 011 the lives of a group of students. While Carmel is always lucid, the demands she makes on the reader require constant efforts of
linguistic and emotional attention. There is no space to go wandering off into unreliable speculations. For example, it is a fair question to ask, 'Why does Carmel stop eating?' But the answers are Carmel's answers. We have no resources that are unavailable to her. True, we have to read carefully all her subtle and unexpected reflections; but our inability or reluctance to read carefully does not mean that the narrator is unreliable.
One of die early cover illustrations for What A Carve Up! showed a boy of about ten playing at being a detective by holding up a magnifying glass; he is examining us while we look back through the glass at his magnified eye. This is a helpful image of the role of Michael in the novel. In the sections where he is the narrator, he seems to be playing the part of the detective, but as the novel progresses we realise that he is also a witness - and more than a witness
- in the mystery he is exploring. As witness in a detective story he is (as explained above) potentially unreliable. His narrator's role is further complicated by the fact that as a character he is so traumatised, depressed and emotionally confused that his personal unreliability infects his account of what is happening. Readers will react with sympathy, perhaps, but also with considerable mistrust, exacerbated by the fact that almost no-one else in the novel can be trusted at all. That Coe plays around with genres, combining political satire, gothic horror, film-narrative trickery, detection and a melancholy personal history with such confidence and spirit is astonishing; Michael is a special kind of unreliable narrator, not to be quite trusted but more to be trusted than anyone else.
We can see the difference between personal uncertainty and narrative unreliability by comparing Michael with Nicholas in Morality Play. Since, from the first page, Nicholas changes his mind and breaks many of his own resolutions, he stands, self-accused as an unreliable man. But when he tells us how he answered the players and what he thought:
"Let me travel with you...I write a good hand, I could * copy parts and prompt the players." Yes, the proposal .<<>
came from me, the first idea, but 1 had no thought in the
beginning of taking part in their plays... we must accept his word, for there is no fourteenth-century alternative text.
in Morality Play we are reading about a historical period that is strange to us, we have to feel our way, step by step, into that mediaeval world which is familiar to Nicholas. On the one hand we are ignorant of the roads and inn-yards, the secrets and beliefs and emblems of that world, but on the other hand we have the benefit of hindsight, of knowing what happened during the next six hundred years. When the players have their discussions about acting a real murder rather than a Bible story, we can easily comprehend, philosophically, how such events can be performed on the stage, because we have inherited the consequences of that leap in the secular imagination. So we bring our secular world-view (and it is irrelevant whether or not we believe in God; we think daily in secular terms) into active dialogue with Nicholas' mediaeval religious imagination. Nicholas is a reliable narrator, but the knowledge we share with the author is used in this novel to emphasise that we camiot identify with Nicholas.
So in all four contemporary novels, the limits of knowledge are explored: the narrator's, the reader's, the author's. Omniscience is not easily embraced in late-twentieth century writing; all the authors are aware that our knowledge of the past must be questionable, that our memories can deceive us, and that so much instant information is available to the human mind that every story must be very partial. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Swift, Mantel and Unsworth are offering us reliable narrators of their own stories, and that Coe is offering us a narrator who is only unreliable insofar as he is trapped in the ingenuities of his own narrative.
The problem of the unreliable narrator is examined above all in Julian Barnes' A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters. This novel is a wonderful riot of voices, narratives, hypotheses, impossibilities that are true, and brilliantly argued evidence which is not true. Each chapter invites us to ask: 'how far can we trust this narrator?' Barnes directly discusses the reader's willingness (or unwilling-
ness) to accept and believe what he is being told in 'Shipwreck', 'Three Simple Stories' and 'Parenthesis', and by implication almost everywhere else. '■ ^
She told the men in the nightmares that she was going to write about them. They smiled and said they would give her a pencil and paper. She refused. She said she would ;
use her own.
(This of Kath, alone in the Pacific Ocean with a couple of cats.) Overall, Barnes' novel is a tour-de-force of ingenious investigation into narrative by a fine and serious novelist.
Unreliable narrators are often associated with 'postmodern' games. 'Postmodernism' is often used as a kind of meaningless password by literary critics. The term has no enlightening definition; it seems to comprise a melange of 'intertextuality' (used by virtually every writer since the beginning of literary composition), infinite possibility of interpretation (a swamp of nonsense) and 'play' - as though Shakespeare, Pushkin and Dickens knew nothing of play. However, insofar as it implies teasing the reader with his own capacity for belief, combined with extensive speculations on our inability to know, 'postmodern' fits A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters.
In this article 1 have touched on some of the questions that must arise when we think about the unreliability of narrators. There is no space here to go more deeply into this problem of literary storytelling. Apart from philosophical issues concerning the status of any work of art, we might consider issues of linguistic ambiguity (in, for example, the work of Henry James and his disciples), of narratives inside other narrtives, even of errors by author-narrators (for instance the crucial early action of Lord of the Flies which is scientifically im possible. Does it matter?) We could also explore further the pact between author and reader which establishes the rules within which we should read the novel. And where exactly are the limits of interpretation if we are faced with different kinds of uncertainty? Perhaps someone else will want to answer these questions or add to the discussion. I leave this article thinking with pleasure that Jane Austen's
narrator is a bold reliable narrator, and that in this she is matched by another intrepid narrator, no less reliable, a woodworm.
