The Unreliable Narrator
Part 2. You Can’t Handle The Truth
One thing leads to another. Unless it leads back to mother. From a young age, I was taught to tell the truth. As telling the truth is the right thing to do, right?
To tell the truth. What a concept.
I want to run when someone prefaces a statement with “To be honest….”
It’s like saying they are never honest, but for this one time, we’ll make an exception to the rules.
Do you remember the first time you told a lie?
I don’t recall what my first lie was but I can make one up for you.
Seriously, I can guarantee that whatever it was, the first lie was told to my mother.
“I bought a bag of 20 fudgesicles about two hours ago. And now they are all gone. Did you kids eat the whole bag? Who here is going to tell me the truth?”
Nervous looks from all three of us. Who will be the first to crack? The first to throw the others under the bus.
I cannot tell a lie Mother. I saw my sisters eating them.
Did I use the math argument, since there were two of them, and only one of me, obviously they ate twice as many as I did. It was unfortunate that we didn’t have a dog or cat to blame.
I don’t remember what actually happened. Just that we piggishly ate twenty fudgesicles in the space of about two hours.
TO TELL THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, SO HELP ME GOD
We learn at a young age that while honesty is admirable, the real truth can be malleable. That’s why they call it stretching the truth. The origin story is a tall tale. Let’s be honest, the truth can be ugly, and who likes ugly things anyway. The truth is never absolute, it can be negotiated. Please understand I am not arguing for the abandonment of truth, nor am I arguing a defence of lying, but sometimes, it’s not about the lie. Sometimes you just don’t tell the whole story. You leave out a few details. Because the truth can hurt. At first because you forgot the details, or wanted to forget. Later, because you want to create a better impression. Still later because you want to manufacture a better impression.
You omit details on purpose, rather than with purpose. Let the listener fill in the details as they wish. What could be more democratic?
We learn at an early age that the message is often improved with less information. The less you say, the more the other party will fill in the gaps themselves. Unfortunately some people’s imagination carries them away. They get lost in the flood.
New invented details can be worse than the actual details. Or maybe more acceptable. In general, people believe what they want to believe, even when the facts would say otherwise. I remember a ride in the car with a family member, he was calling in sick, and invented a wild story, one that was not remotely sounding plausible. He finished the call. I asked “why didn’t you just tell the truth. You actually had a good excuse to be off today.”
He said that wouldn’t be any fun.
Truth bending goes back, way back, to the Bible itself. Jonah and The Whale? A pillar of salt? Rose from the dead after three days?
I’m not saying the Bible is a Book of Lies, but let’s at least call it creative non-fiction. What it really is a collection of unreliable narrators. What other book has been so widely read, so translated and rewritten, when even the translator didn’t understand the original meaning. Framed, badly interpreted, its messages misinterpreted and bent to the dealer’s advantage. House Rules.
It is not reportage or historical fact, but rather a collection of stories, archetypes, myth, fables. Fractured fairy tales.
“They”say there is two sides to a story. There is the side that tells the story, and the side that listens to the story. In a conversation, these two sides exchange stories. A conversation is built on an exchange of thoughts.
However, this definition of conversation is flawed. It does not account for the talkover gene. Have you never heard of the talkover gene?
Google it. You won’t find it. I discovered it. Invented it.
Sorry that’s a lie. My brother coined the term. He was the first to point out to me that the talkover gene is a family trait.
“Talking over" someone simply means "to continue to talk even while the other person is still talking". Should we excuse this as enthusiasm, or is it a sign of a greater narcissism? Does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun shine out of my behind? Is the son the greater of two parts?
I was at band practice, and we had a break. Everyone was talking. At the same time. Levels ever increasing. I was scrolling on my phone ignoring the tower of babbling.
My drummer says “Why are you so quiet? Are you just being antisocial?”
I replied that I saw no point in attempting to jump into a conversation where nobody pauses long enough to allow another voice to get in edgewise.
Even though my brother asserts that the talkover gene is a family trait, it doesn’t sound like the manners I was taught. It seems rude, because voices don’t just talk over each other, they also rise in volume in a layering effect. Unfortunately, the way my hearing works, I cannot hear anyone if more than one person is speaking. The sound becomes a blurring aural monolith. So I would rather shut up than add to cacophony.
How does this relate to the Unreliable Narrator?
One morning the phrase “unreliable narrator” came into my head. These random thoughts often wake me, and take me to the wise sage Uncle Google.
I like to learn what the dictionary definition is, then see the common usage and examples thereof.
I type in unreliable narrator. Let’s take a dip in the murky definitions, the dark waters that hold no mercy, down the rabbit hole. Here is what I found. Masterclass defines Unreliable Narrator as follows:
4 Types of Unreliable Narrators
Picaro. The picaro is a character who has a knack for exaggerating. ...
Madman. The madman is unreliable because they are mentally detached from reality. ...
Naif. The naif's narrative abilities are impacted by inexperience or age. ...
Liar.
Picaro is Spanish for naught boy, rogue, Bohemian. Picaresque derives from picaro. Examples would be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Billy Pilgrim, Ignatius Jacques Reilly, Winston Smith.
There were many examples of writing that features unreliable narrators. My favourite narrators are unreliable. Here is a curated sampling:
The Art of Starving is the story of Matt, a bullied gay teenage boy who discovers that he develops supernatural powers when he starves himself. He is in desperate need of these powers, as his world is spinning rapidly out of his control.
The Vegetarian tells the story of Yeong-hye, a graphic artist and home-maker who, one day, suddenly decides to stop eating meat after a series of dreams involving images of animal slaughter. This abstention leads her to become distanced from her family and from society. The author explains, “ The idea for the book originally came to me as an image of a woman turning into a plant. I wrote a short story, “The Fruit of My Woman,” in 1997, where a woman literally turns into a plant. After several years (2003–2004) I reworked this image in The Vegetarian, in a darker and fiercer way."
The Catcher in the Rye is a classic. I read it many years ago when I was a teenager. It is two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, Holden searches for truth and rails against the “phoniness” of the adult world. He ends up exhausted and emotionally unstable.
Another example, not mentioned but one that I have love is Hunger by Knut Hamsun, written in 1890. Hunger is a novel recounting the adventures of a starving young man whose sense of reality gives way to a delusionary existence on the darker side of a modern metropolis. It is one of the earliest examples of psychological fiction.
All four of these books are examples of an author utilizing the voice of an unreliable narrator.
Thomas Bernhard is another favourite the hall of infamous unreliable narrators.Kent Kosack wrote in his essay, THOMAS BERNHARD: YOUR TYPICAL STORY-DESTROYER, “Thomas Bernhard isn’t the subject of this essay. His style is—the tools he employs; the repetition; the bizarre speech markers; the tortured digressions; the violent interruptions of both voice and narrative arc; the rampant use of cliché to undermine his own originality; the dark humor poking through it all; the unreliable narrators telling stories that were told to them by unreliable storytellers who were in turn told the tales they’re telling by unreliable witnesses to the event being narrated; the massive paragraphs; and lack of chapters that refuse to give the reader any white space in which to pause, to catch their breath. His style—and his influence.
Bernhardt wrote a few memoirs as well. We can all agree that memoirs are inherently unreliable. A modern unreliable memoir was “A Million Tiny Pieces” by James Frey, which was chosen as Oprah’s book of the month. He capsized his own success with the revelation that much of the memoir was fictional. Still it was a great read. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
I often attributed that to my father, as I attribute the phrase everything in moderation, including moderation to my mother. I am not certain either of them ever said either phrase. Most likely if they did, they heard it elsewhere before. Did I tell you my father was Mark Twain?
And my mother was Oscar Wilde. I was their bastard love child.
So who do we trust?
Thats the real question here. Enquiring minds and the unreliable narrator wants to know.
We can’t even separate the news and fake news. Fake news, Fox News, CNN.
Choose your poison. It’s a self serve bar here.
Why do we even call it news when impartiality went out with the Dry Look.
Modern news is editorial, not journalism.
Do we have to go back to Walter Cronkite to find a narrator we can trust?
Don’t forget that in the 60’s, much of the story was hidden, it was not told.
Out of respect? Common courtesy?
Whispers, yes. Gossip, yes. Back stabbing, ok. Innuendo, check.
The 60’s were not a sharing time. Not in my house. Not on my watch.
You know it’s strange times or end days when Bob Dylan win the Pulitzer for literature for his unreliable narrators. Any song over seven minutes is fertile ground for the seeds of a shaggy dog story. And Bobby is King Shaggy of the shaggy dog story fame.
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, inside a Shaggy Dog, it’s too dark to read. But if you look down, you may step in something.
Who dropped the fortune cookies in the forest?
Are these the ranting of a madman or the drippings of a Maltese Falcon, found on the newspaper of our cage?
Are we wandering in a forest of our own creation, picking up the crumbs of Hitchcock‘s Macguffin?
(For those unfamiliar, a macguffin is not a breakfast sandwich from MacDonalds.)
A MacGuffin can be an object, a plot device, or an event necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but ultimately insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in its original sense. You can take this as gospel from me although I didn’t write the Bible.
I am notoriously long winded, often irrelevant, but never an elephant.
Always the Brideshead, never revisited.
“I was sitting home alone one night, in L.A. watching old Cronkite on the seven o'clock news. It seems there was an earthquake that Left nothing but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes.
Didn't seem like much was happening
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer
Seems like every time you turn around
There's another hard-luck story that you're gonna hear
And there's really nothing anyone can say
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay.”
Dylan/ Jacques Levy, Black Diamond Bay, Desire.
