Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Narrative Reliability (or Help! My Main Character is a Pathological Liar)

One of the earliest challenges in the story-writing process is trying to sort out just who is telling the story. Are you, the author, pulling the strings as an omniscient, omnipresent narrative voice? Have you handed the reins over to your protagonist, explaining details through his or her eyes? Is perhaps the story being told by a more minor character about your protagonist? The possibilities, while probably not endless, are certainly many and varied.
For my current project, I decided that my narration would jump between two lesser-but-vital characters, describing the world of the main characters through their eyes and perceptions. This is clever! I thought to myself gleefully. There will be all sorts of depth and opinions to color their views, it will be excellent!
Except, I have realized I have a small problem in doing this. I'm not really sure how reliable either of my narrators--or nay, even my main protagonists--are as narrators.
Well,
you may be thinking, you should know how reliable your characters are, aren't you creating them? Yes and no.

The plus side of using characters to narrate your story is that you can really dig into how the character perceives everything around him/her. The downside is that if your character's perceptions are colored by outside factors--perhaps they really hate or don't trust people, or perhaps they're really oblivious--you may not be getting the full picture. Your narration is only as reliable as your narrator, and your narrator can't get into every character's head (unless said narrator is telepathic, but that's another discussion for another day). That's why using an omniscient, objective narrative voice is sometimes viewed as the 'better' choice--they don't have the same hangups as a fallible character actually in the heat of the story, only able to see things through one set of eyes--her own--only.

In my current project, I'm starting to find narration pretty tricky. One of my characters is in the dark about the main protagonists' big family secret, and she has to stay in the dark for at least one more chapter. When she DOES find out, her own background and opinions are no doubt going to color her new perception of the protagonists and, if we're being completely honest, it's going to have some negative connotations. So how will her narration change? With everything somewhat tinged with distrust on her part, how can a reader entirely trust her account of things? As for the other narrator, she's in on the secret, but she also has a very particular agenda, which does not always make for reliable narration, because she's always looking for the 'how to achieve MY goals' angle. The protagonists themselves are also not 100% reliable as subjects for narrating, because they have a tendency to lie, and they're also, possibly, quite insane. Dilemma.

Yet, as has been proved in countless stories, sometimes a decidedly unreliable narrator/subject is interesting, and that unreliability is actually an integral part of the story. Consider The White Hotel for example: the woman who is the central narrative voice for much of the story is decidedly unreliable--first she rambles, explicitly, about sex at this crazy resort where people keep dying in freak accidents, like ski lifts falling and all sorts of other natural disasters. Then the reader discovers (with the help of another, apparently more reliable, narrator) that all of the first two sections were really an allegory for her confused sexuality, and the events didn't actually happen. Then the next section proves that more-reliable-narrator completely wrong when we see that it was all an allegory and premonition for something much, much worse than an internal struggle, and then, at the end of it all, we discover that both of the narrators....but I won't spoil that for you. Go read it :P

The point is that a narrator's (un)reliability is not necessary a liability (though it sometimes certainly feels like it >.<), but it is something that needs to be worked around. So, writers, what do you prefer? An objective, omniscient narrator, or narration from the pov of a character? And why?

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