Unreliable Narrator?

Question

Can anyone think of any effects of having an unreliable narrator in a novel? I got the idea that the ideas may be biased due to 1 point of view but cannot think of anything else! Any ideas???

Answer 1

scenes are left open ended, questions are unresolved, conflict doesnt' build well, the reader gets frustrated and bored trying to figure out what in the heck is going on with the story.

Answer 2

Unreliable narrator is not necessarily a bad thing depending on how it's done. It may be most effective, in my opinion, in first person. The reason for this is that if your third person narrator is unreliable, the reader's glass which is usually quite clear to the point they don't even notice the narrator's voice becomes smoky. The narrator becomes a character and we are suddenly aware of his/her presence. Thus we are further disconnected from the direct action and we can see that we are hearing a fictional story from a fictional character's voice -- a story within a story. First person unreliable narrators are fun to play with, though. A lot of people think they understand things they don't and there is a lot of room to shape a plot using this.

For example -- I have a character who is committing suicide, but doesn't consciously know why. His life is pretty much mediocre, but when recounting his past relationships he realizes that his time with a former girlfriend studying in France had effected him so profoundly as to instill a doubt in himself that has led to the moment he pulls the trigger.

He starts out with very superficial observations, like how silly it feels to have a gun in his mouth, why he chose a .45 since it is so big and hard to open his mouth around, why he is wearing a white shirt when all the blood might scare his coworkers when they show up to find his body etc, etc. He even says that if he is killing himself over a girl, he is pathetic. The irony is that he sees relationships in a narrow light, that only the love itself can push him to die, but in fact it is that her carefree personality is something he can only find in a bullet.

See what I mean here? We don't hate him for being wrong at first, it's very human. Some might even relate to his plight, but what gets readers pissed is if he just remains an idiot and learns nothing, doesn't change, has no revelations of any sort.
You have to change the status quo, bad to good or good to bad, and as long as that happens anything goes.

Answer 3

Fallible Narrator

Answer 4

Certain facts may left out or twisted. If the narrator dislikes someone, they may persuade the reader to believe that person is bad, even if that is not the case. Perhaps if the narrator is a murderer, he will claim to be sane, and twist the story to make it appear that someone else is guilty.

Answer 5

Montresor from A Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe.

Answer 6

"A novel has to have a narrator. This can be the first person ‘I’ narrator, such as in Robinson Crusoe, or the limited point of view narrator written in the third person but seeing no more than the ‘I’ narrator would see. For example, in the Harry Potter series, we never see any part of the action that Harry does not see himself. There is also the ‘omniscient narrator’, who represents exactly the author’s voice and knows everything the author knows. The omniscient narrator can follow the fortunes of different characters, such as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or can pontificate about wider issues and address the reader directly, as the narrator often does in the books of Charles Dickens. Until the end of the nineteenth century, narrators were generally regarded as honest and reliable, at least in the context of the world they are in. Since the twentieth century, though, the unreliable narrator, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or in J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, has come to the fore. The unreliable narrator may be too naïve to understand what is going on, as in these two examples, or may be (in the world of the book) trying to justify or cover-up what really happened. In The Spire, William Golding’s narrator’s naïvity and medical condition make him a completely unreliable narrator, while in his Pincher Martin the twist ending leaves real questions about who the narrator is, and whether the account is supernatural, allegorical, hallucinatory, representing the last moments before death, or representing the dreams of an entirely different character. In Jerome K Jerome’s Three men in a boat the unwillingness of the narrator to be entirely honest is used for comic effect."

The 2nd link has even more.
A sample:
"One of the most successful of these sub-structures was the device of the unreliable narrator. This was used for more than two hundred years before its existence was explicitly defined for the first time by Wayne C Booth in his seminal study, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).

The unreliable narrator will appear imperceptive when confronted with a situation subject to decoding different from his own. This decoding constitutes an interpretation brought about by evidence in the narrative not available to him, but recognized by the reader. Thus, there occurs a complicity between text and reader, from which the unreliable narrator is excluded.

In an extreme instance, an unreliable narrator may be identified as one whose vision is disturbed. What he sees as reality, the reader will reject as delusion. The unreliable narrator takes as fact that which the evidence in the text contradicts. His word cannot therefore be accepted by a reasonable person. The unreliable narrator may not be insane, but he may, if we take the text as 'centre', be eccentric. The unreliable narrator tends to be embittered (rather than disillusioned); paranoid (rather than wary); inexperienced (rather than innocent); self-absorbed (rather than self- aware).

Henry Fielding affords an early example. The eponymous hero of Tom Jones is provided with a counterpoise in the shape of the Man of the Hill. This old gentleman's story has sometimes been thought an excrescence upon the main plot, and so it would be, if we were to take his word at its face value. Yet the plain facts of his story show him to have been a drunkard, a lecher, a thief, a gamester, and worse. More than that, he has learned nothing from his various experiences. He has travelled the world, but admits to have spoken with none but postilions. He professes an enthusiasm for nature, but tells us nothing of his observations. Now approaching the end of his life, he lives as a recluse, incongruously dressed as Robinson Crusoe in cap, boots and the skins of animals. Though he claims to be secure in the unfrequented spot where he lives, Tom Jones first encounters him being attacked by ruffians.

The Man of the Hill is a mass of contradictions. He extols God, but assures Tom that he deprecates Christians in favour of Turks. He praises all parts of Creation except mankind, whom he denounces. When Tom points out the extreme limitation of the old man's acquaintance, he replies ad hominem, that a person as young as Tom cannot be expected to know anything. His discourse reveals an ignorance of himself, and consequently of human nature at large, which has trapped him in this shallow cynicism. The game is given away at every step by the gap between his assumption that his arguments are valid and the hollowness with which they are voiced. At the climax of his revelations the prose, were it not in character, could be typified as turgid and grandiloquent, larded as it is with adjectives such as 'glorious', 'immortal', 'eternal', 'stupendous', 'divine', 'ineffable', 'incomprehensible', 'glorious'. The Man of the Hill assumes the mantle of wisdom, but shows himself to be morally blinkered.

The cynical attitudes here deployed serve as a contrast to the personality of Tom Jones. Unlike the Man of the Hill, Tom seeks acquaintance with people in every walk of life and, as the novel proceeds, develops into a maturity which is the reverse of cynicism.

Fielding was, in many respects, the master of Dickens, who used the technique of the unreliable narrator on several occasions. None of these is more telling than 'The History of a Self- Tormentor', which occurs as a quasi-independent episode in Little Dorrit. Here the unfulfilled Lesbian, Miss Wade, tells her own story with a paranoid slant that prevents the reader accepting her overt interpretation.

At school, Miss Wade admits to focusing her attention exclusively upon one particular girl. The girl in question, however, has other friends, and 'could distribute, and did distribute, pretty looks and smiles to every one among them'. It is plain that Miss Wade is obsessional. That emphasis on 'distribute' would begin to sow suspicion, even in a trusting reader. As a young adult, Miss Wade goes as a governess to the family of a poor nobleman. Here, she feels her ascendancy over the children to be undermined by 'a nurse...a rosy-faced woman always making an obtrusive pretence of being gay and good-humoured'. All 'pretence' is in Miss Wade's own mind. The reader may infer that the children are put off by her tension, not by any activity on the part of the nurse. In fact the nurse attempts to protect her, warning the children, 'Don't make a noise, my dears, her head aches'.

The reader has only Miss Wade's word for it that such attentions are hypocritical, and the exaggerated tone of her narrative precludes belief. As with the Man of the Hill, the drift of Miss Wade's vocabulary is symptomatic of unreliability. Words of negative import obtrude in these domestic situations: 'misfortune', 'suspicion', 'perfidy', ''gonies', and the like. Indeed, an overt violence breaks out: 'rather than suffer so, I could so hold her in my arms and plunge to the bottom of a river - where I would still hold her, after we were both dead'; 'I would burn my sight away by throwing myself into the fire, rather than I would endure to look at their plotting faces'. Such statements disperse the credit of the person voicing them.

One would assume from this that the gap between narrative levels, reliable and unreliable, is clear. There have been cases, however, when an insufficiently alert reader could have been confused. Such an instance occurs in Robert Louis Stevenson.

The protagonist of The Master of Ballantrae is never fairly set before the reader. He appears as seen by two equally unreliable narrators. One is Ephraim Mackellar, a painstaking Edinburgh graduate, steward to Lord Durrisdeer, whose limits are delineated by his methodical prose style. He proves himself to be obsessionally hostile to Lord Durrisdeer's elder son. This elder son, the Master of Ballantrae of the title, is a fugitive from the Stuart rebellion of 1745. Consequently, he has been disinherited. As though anxious to find one redeeming trait in the hated Master, Mackellar attests - not once but several times - a high opinion of his enemy's courage. He says of the Master, 'He was no coward' (Chapter I); 'a man more insusceptible of fear is not conceivable' (Chapter III).

This view is endorsed by the other narrator, the Chevalier Burke. He signals an extent of unreliability through his habit of forgetting names, dates and locations. The facility of his nature is suggested by an easy and colloquial style. Burke fails to understand the reason for the Master's flight from Alan Breck Stewart (Chapter III); he is astonished by the Master's hysterical outburst when lost in the wilderness (Chapter III); he cannot fathom why the Master pretends not to know him in 'that city, the name of which I cannot call to mind' (Chapter VII).

But the answer proves to be basic: the Master is a coward. Mackellar, in his introversion, assumes all fighting men are courageous; the Chevalier, an easy-going adventurer, simply does not understand the nature of pusillanimity. Yet the facts, as retailed by the book, contradict both these narrators' interpretations. So far as he can, the Master always avoids outright conflict. When unavoidably locked in a duel with his brother, who has usurped his title, the Master fights foul (Chapter V). We can infer from the narrative of the Chevalier that the Master also shirks a tussle with that bold warrior (Chapter III)."