“I can see you out there staring at me.
Your eyes are watching my every move.
They stare with a look of judgement, as if you want me to fail.
Your eyes are threatening, scrutinizing my every word, ridiculing my movements, laughing
at my facial expressions.
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 bore into me like a knife, as if you are discovering a perverse, violent delight
in seeing me as ridiculous.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
As 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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretend for a moment that you are an author who wants to write a first-person story that
employs this mode of narration.
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.
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.
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.
While a reader listens to that narrator and notices these patterns, he/she themselves
might begin to take on the role of an arm-chair therapist, listening for clues and markers
in the narration that signal why the narrative voice perceives and describes things the way
they do.
An influential Modernist writer from Ireland, James Joyce, employed the technique in some
of his earliest short stories.
In one of Joyce’s most highly anthologized pieces of short fiction, entitled “Araby,”
he has a mid-adolescent boy as an unreliable narrator tell the story of a few days during
which he becomes obsessed, with and eventually talks to, the girl of his first sexual crush,
who is the older sister of one of his good friends.
The boy has been born and raised a strict Catholic in 19th century Ireland, and when
Joyce has him relate the first time he views the young women in isolation, the narrator
tells us: She was waiting for us, her figure defined
by the light from the half opened door.
Her brother always teased her a bit before he obeyed and I stood by the railings looking
at her.
Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from
side to side.
The second time he sees her he tells us:
She held one on of the spikes [of the railing], bowing her head towards me.
The light from the lamp opposite our door caught
the white curve of her neck, lit up the hair that rested there, and, falling,
lit up the hand upon the railing.
It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white
border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
In both passages, the boy’s perceptions of the girl suggest he sees her symbolically
like an angel, back-lit by a pure white light, as in the way he would have been taught to
think about women through images of the Virgin Mary.
But, he also notes her swaying hair, her white neck, and just the edge of her undergarment
(her petticoat).
As we read these passages, Joyce gives us clues to understand that the boy’s perception
of the girl has been shaped by his culture’s religious-based understanding of femininity
as it is coming into conflict here with his earliest sexual impulses.
The boy does not fully understand this, even though he is the narrator of the story, but
a perceptive reader can draw these conclusions from the ironic distance he gains by reading
the narration carefully in this manner.
In this way, the first-person unreliable narrator mode creates an psychological portrait of
the narrator that is shared between the author and the reader, but is often never fully recognized
by the character him/herself.