How Can You Tell?

How often have you read in a book review a comment on the use of, or presence of, an "Unreliable Narrator"?  Whenever I have encountered a reviewer commenting on the presence of an unreliable narrator, I feel that the implication is that most narrators are reliable - or, at least, the reader is entitled to expect the narrator to be reliable. 

We as readers seem to expect the fiction we read to make sense - to have a logically connected beginnning, middle, and end.  Indeed, most readers would be disappointed if there were not some sort of moral to the story.  How often have you seen criticism heaped upon the head of an author who has left the reader too far "up in the air" with no promise of a sequel to tidy up the loose ends?  We only tend to suspect unreliability in the narrator if the author drops some clues into the story that point us in that direction.  But, in real life, how reliable is any narrator?

There is an abundance of scientific research that explains why this is so; our minds actively seek patterns, relationships, and causation in the world around us, including our leisure reading activities.  The willing suspension of disbelief can be shattered when too much of the story just does not make sense to us.

There is also, however, a plethora of research that shows just how unreliable any narrator - including ourselves - can be.  Memory is plastic, our minds can never cope with all the data coming in at any given moment, and must selectively filter and focus on a part of that data, excluding or pushing to one side the rest of it.

Police, for example know this, and understand that different witnesses to an event will give different accounts - and will often feel quite certain of the accuracy of their account.  Lawyers know it too, and take advantage of it in court by pretending that the jury should believe that any conflict in the evidence is proof that it is false and misleading - yet those same lawyers, if they detect too high a level of consistency between the evidence, say, of two police, will immediately pounce with accusations of collusion in, and fabrication of, said evidence.  In both instances, the lawyers may or may not be right, but how is the poor jury to know?

In real life, we know, or should know, that someone telling us a story may or may not be reliable, and that we may need to draw on extra resources to assess the accuracy of facts or opinions offered to us.

Do we have a rational way of determining the reliability of that narrator? Probably not - most humans seem to rely on a mix of prejudices, learned experiences, and ancient instincts to judge the reliability of a narrator, and we often, to our cost, get it wrong.

We, individually, and in groups, build our own story on the stories we have seen and heard and - to some degree or another - believed.  Are all those story building-blocks reliable?  Is our input into the story reliable?  Are our memories reliable?  Confused?

Good - when we are writing fiction, we need to keep this in mind; it is highly unlikely that any of our characters are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  It is equally likely that other characters will be listening through their own set of filters, interpreting the protagonist's words and actions differently than the protagonist intended. 

A good example of this would be Muriel Barbery's book Gourmet Rhapsody.  Each chapter is short; most are narrated by the main character - the famous food critic - while the rest are narrated by various people (and animals) who were, to a greater or lesser extent, part of his life.  There is overlap, and there are contradiction - each narrator seems to be sincere; so who does the reader believe?

I could not say how many times I have worked behind a bar, filling glasses, wiping spilt beer, and observing as a story is told and re-told over a space of hours; watching it grow and change with each repeating, until the gap between the first edition and the last is so great that it would be hard to believe that they were about the same incident - only the names of the people and places involved are the same - mostly. 

And yet, if challenged, the teller at the end would usually be as certain of the accuracy of that account as he or she had been about the first version.  And as for the version I hear the next day, after the story has been taken home to new audiences, re-told, embellished, polished, and re-presented, even the names have started to change by then.

So, let your characters lie, exaggerate, conceal, contradict, omit, forget, mis-speak, mis-interpret, and misunderstand; after all, they are only human.