Hey guys, I have a story idea and I’m tempted to make an unreliable narrator for it. I’ve never written one and I was wondering if anyone had any advice for writing one. I was planning on reading some books with unreliable narrators to help so if you know of any please tell me. Thanks for reading!
Definitely try reading Lolita first and a handful of others with an unreliable narrator before attempting it yourself.
The key to an unreliable narrator is that he or she has something to hide. But over the course of the story, the truth will be revealed, either explicitly or by evidence that creeps in. It could be as profound as guilt of genocide, or as trivial as a secret love for someone the narrator cannot have a relationship with, or even embarrassment over a childhood incident. But there's a reason the narrator shades the truth. And it need not be that the narrator is aware of his or her deception; the narrator might be biased or blind to a possibility. Hopefully, this will suggest some ideas to play with.
I'm confused by what is meant by an unreliable narrator? Like the narrator themselves is intentionally hiding things from the reader? I don't like that idea at all, it would make me not trust anything that was said in the story and that would just annoy me. If you mean a narrator that simply doesn't have the information needed to fully tell the story, I could name a bunch of examples. Huck Finn and Hatchet are probably two good ones, both involve children narrators who didn't entirely have the maturity to be reliable. Then you also have the types of narrators who aren't telling the reader a story, they are telling someone specific a story, so the reader gets the same purposeful hiding as the other side of the conversations. Lots of crime dramas do that. I believe also in Life of Pi, Pi himself provides two completely different accounts of how he ended up in a lifeboat.
Not necessarily hiding. If you look at a narrator like Humbert Humbert, for example--he's telling you what happened, telling you about his "affair" with Lolita. But it is clear that his take on things is heavily colored. His rationalizations put a cloud over everything. It's clear that the way he views things isn't entirely reasonable, or even factual, though he believes it to be so.
Just as an attempt at clarification, the kind of unreliable narrator I mean is one that has all the information and has a dark secret having to do with the antagonist that is revealed near the end of the book as a major twist.
In that case, I think you need a very good reason why the narrator chose to withhold the information for so long. It's easy to screw that up and end up with unhappy readers.
My take on an unreliable narrator is one who cannot tell the truth because they are unable to tell reality from fantasy through hallucinations (see Fight Club) or have slipped into a fantasy world and are taking the reader with them. Or they are withholding information from the reader. This is OK if it is known from early on in the book that there is something the narrator is not letting you in on. It has been used as a device to keep the reader intrigued, by wondering and guessing what is being kept from them (see GBH by Ted Lewis).
