To achieve this you might make the narrator give background on who they are, where they’ve grown up or lived, and why the particular event they are recounting has compelled them to tell the story. By way of placing into the mouth of your narrator noticeable repetitions, exaggerations, patterns of thought, and especially symbolic perceptions, your story, through this narrator, would become as much about the narrator’s psychology as it is about the events he/she is unfolding. Part of the reason you chose this narrative style is not only because you want your audience to understand that any person’s reality is in part always subjective (as in the famous phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder), but that you want your audience not only to grasp how the narrator’s thoughts and descriptions become how he or she sees the world, but also why he/she sees it that way. Pretend for a moment that you are an author who wants to write a first-person story that employs this mode of narration. The descriptions will often also imply the family and cultural environments that shaped his/her views, and so contributed to how he/she perceives and makes meaning from the world around them. In this way, an unreliable narrator’s version of events and characters in the story will also build to reveal, simultaneously, his/her own personal prejudices, anxieties, fears, tastes, delusions, and even beliefs. But unlike the classic omniscient (all-knowing) third-person narrator, the first-person unreliable narrator never suggests they are like the God of their world by offering you a mutually agreed upon objectivity (Once upon a time, these people did this) but rather gives you his/her own view of what happened and why it appears so important that it needed to become a story. As a narrator, I would not be attempting to offer my audience objective facts of a recognizable reality, but rather my highly-colored perceptions and interpretations, given without any third-party or factual corroboration to demonstrate these as accurate, or even to suggest my awareness of my personal bias.Īs a reader of any story (or watcher in this case) we undergo what is called a willing suspension of disbelief as we read so as to attempt to understand the narration, trust the narrator, and interpret why the story is being told toward some implied politics, idea, or theme. My perceptions of you would now become the reality of the narration of my story, but they are most likely far from the reality of how you are looking at me now on your screen. Notice that, from the details of my perceptions, I’ve revealed some issues regarding my relationship with my father and even more, I’ve projected these onto you as if they were the objective truth of how you’re watching me. If I were a first-person narrator in a story that focused on my descriptions of other characters and the events of the plot, what I just said would be a good example of the literary technique called the unreliable or untrustworthy narrator. Your eyes bore into me like a knife, as if you are discovering a perverse, violent delight in seeing me as ridiculous.” They are eyes my father looked at me from as he condescended to me and constantly criticized he too always hoped that I would fail, just to prove him right. Your eyes are threatening, scrutinizing my every word, ridiculing my movements, laughing at my facial expressions. They stare with a look of judgment, as if you want me to fail. Click HERE for Spanish transcript)īy Neil Davison, Oregon State University Professor of British and Irish Literatures What is an Unreliable Narrator? Transcript (English and Spanish Subtitles Available in Video. Conference for Antiracist Teaching, Language and Assessment.Fall 2023 Undergraduate Course Descriptions.Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS).Scientific, Technical, and Professional Communication Certificate.
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