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.

To Believe or not to Believe.......

A big flaw in our political process is gulf between the story a politician believes, and the story they tell to get elected. They know that the story they believe and live by is one that a majority of voters will not accept.  So they tell a story they know that enough voters will accept, despite their intention to push on with their preferred story after the election.

The successful politician knows that people need a story that will seem to make sense of events, and of the decisions being made by government - they know that the story that will resonate with the electorate is the one that feels acceptable to the voters, and that objective truth does not need to be a major part of that story.  Indeed, truth often runs a very distant last in the race when the other contender is a story that fits the desires, prejudices, and beliefs of the audience.

The old adage "Truth is stranger than fiction" is particularly applicable in the field of politics.  Even a light skim of the daily news - local, national, and international - will provide stories that make you stop and exclaim "How could anyone be so stupid" or "Surely they didn't think we would believe that" or "I wonder who is paying who" or even just "That can't possibly be the real reason they are doing this - what is really going on?"

Every now and then a novelist hits the big time by asking the right "What if" question, and then turning the answer into the book that gets published - just before some real life incident that closely resembles the plot of the novel.  How many "What Ifs" have been discarded as too unrealistic, only to find reality mirroring imagination within weeks or months of the screwed up paper hitting the side of the rubbish bin?  In a flash, an idea that seemed too outlandish to publish has become a moment in the history books.  How many authors have stared at the evening news and asked themselves "How could I have tossed that idea away?" or "Why did I take so long to finish that first draft?"  I am one - are you?

Was there, in the torrent of political thrillers that have washed across the shelves and check-out counters of the world's book shops and libraries, one that presaged the Presidential actions that gave us Watergate?  Did some Italian novelist write a story that accurately predicted the awful and undignified end to which Mussolini succumbed? Apart from a possible link to an episode of The Simpsons, has any author really predicted what is happening in the USofA at the moment?

There are times when truth and fiction are equally strange and become inextricably entangled, as evidenced by the conspiracy theories that swirl about in the aftermath of great events, growing in number and complexity, and attracting supporters the way the Canberra street lights draw in the Bogong Moths. 

Did anyone in Australia (or elsewhere) predict in a novel the tumultuous days that came to a head on the steps of Parliament House in December 1975?  Conspiracy theories abound regarding that event, too, and who knows, perhaps one of them is fact rather than theory?

Our need to identify patterns and order make us a sucker for a story that suggests a conspiracy - some of us more so than others. Stories that hint at secrets and conspiracies get our attention - we expect every action to be the result of an active agent, to have a reason behind it, and for it to be part of a discernable, comprehensible narrative.  We want answers, and we want them in a shape, texture, and colour that we can accept and enjoy.

Recently, I read Lee Child's novel "Night School" - in it, an unexpected protagonist gets between the original villains and the hero, as they all pursue the acquisition or recovery of some missing weapons.  The conspiracies are manifold, and weave about each other in ever more complex patterns - yet they never discomfit the reader's willing suspension of disbelief.  As part of the plot, Child has postulated a conspiracy that sees an infiltration of German law enforcement by Neo-Nazi types, though he doesn't specifically name them as such.

Only weeks after reading the novel, and within a year of its publication, I opened the newspaper and found a story about a growing scandal in Germany - it was a serious infiltration of the country's military forces by Neo-Nazis, and the subsequent misuse and theft of weapons by those infiltrators.

Humans are basically the primates who became story tellers.  We use stories to make sense of ourselves and our world.  Our need for stories, and the way we use and abuse them, is like the proverbial box of matches - a match can light the fire that cooks a meal or warms a hearth, or start the bushfire that razes a million acres and a thousand homes.   “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

We need stories to map our past, present, and future, and many of us will cling to our favourite ones in the face of an avalanche of facts that contradict the core "truths" of those favourites. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

Filters are applied to weed out the inconvenient truths and bothersome data, and compatible facts and information are sought out to help build and strengthen the stories we prefer.  Joel Shepherd, in his Cassandra Kresnov series, coined a wonderful term to deal with this aspect of human nature, and Andrew Pollack describes it very well in his blog  here -  Compulsive NarrativeSyndrome

Enjoy your storytelling - may all your stories fall on eager ears, and sail on down the winds of time to become part of the great story that humanity has been weaving for so long.  Perhaps, one day, one of your "What if" stories will be venerated as prophecy - or at least they may say of it, as we said of our village newspaper, years ago - "Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato".