It was a typical day in the fall semester, and I had just concluded a meeting with a board of an organization of which I am the president. I had checked off the boxes, and I was conversing with two of the board members about literature, naturally, as I am studying English Literature. We were talking about books we liked, and I mentioned how C. S. Lewis’ last novel Till We Have Faces (mentioned in my last blog post) has an unreliable narrator, Orual.

The VP of the board smartly pointed out: Every narrator is an unreliable narrator.

My contrary self moved immediately to deny this claim, but something held me back. Was he right? He is a smart, well-read young man with strong morals and a great sense of humor, I might add. And thus was born this musing.

Let me briefly define an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is “a narrator that is not trustworthy, whose rendition of events must be taken with a grain of salt.” Hmm, sounds like my ex. Definition continued: “We tend to see such narrators especially in first-person narration, since that form of narration tends to underline the motives behind the transmission of a given story.” (Reference) It is amazing what literature can do. The way I see it, first person narration gives one the ability to read minds. This is the most plausible of super powers that any human can have. Other than love, of course. Love is the most powerful force of all.

So, if I disagreed with him, then I would bring up the example of the Harry Potter series. J. K. Rowling is a wonderful writer, and although I haven’t read the books in a while, I remember that the books felt very objective. We learned things outside of Harry’s experience. In other words, the story is richer because of the third story narration. If Rowling had decided to write in first person, the fourth book would have opened completely differently. And although Harry is smart, it would have been much more difficult for us readers to figure out and understand the last few books, at least for me.

However, if I agreed with him, using the same example, the Harry Potter series is very much a Harry-centered book, obviously, since his character is the name of the series. However, the narrator him/herself (Rowling is the writer, but a narrator is slightly different) always neglected to explain the feelings and psyche of characters other than Harry’s, Ron’s, or Hermione’s, and when she does explain the psyche of characters like Draco Malfoy or even Tom Riddle himself, it only serves to illustrate them as villains. Besides, Dumbledore always ends up explaining things anyway, so even then, we do not get thoughts or feelings from other characters other than Harry. So, I would definitely have to agree with my VP because of this.

Let us think of another example…would it be too cliché to pick a Shakespeare piece? Yes. Hmmm… should I chose an author who has better political ideals than Rowling? Well, I’ve already talked about C. S. Lewis on this blog. And I haven’t read J. R. R. Tolkein. Hmmm…let’s choose A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I admittedly do not know about Knowles’ political ideals, but quite frankly, I do not care. I appreciate good writing, no matter what one’s beliefs are. Unless you are a socialist. Then anything you do is discredited and should be thrown in the trash.

Anyway…I will admit, I have not read this book recently. I read it once for my American literature class in 10th grade when I was 15 years old. That was five years ago, and many things have happened in those five years. So, I do apologize in advance for any inaccuracy or misinterpretation. However, I do want to say that I wanted to fetch my notebook from that class (yes, I keep notebooks from my classes. I just feel like one disposes of knowledge when one disposes of notebooks. Yes, knowledge is in your head, but it is impossible for me to remember everything. And besides, after five years of keeping the notebook, it did serve to be useful after all). However, after I turned my everything upside down, I have yet to find it. So, I will go off of memory. I decided to choose this book because both my mother and I have read it, so I am using this fact as a gauge. I hope pretty much everyone has read this book.

Gene Forrester and Finny go to an all boys boarding school, and long-story-short, Gene pushes Finny off a tree. I don’t have the will to summarize the whole thing, so I apologize to those who have not read it. The thing I would like to focus on is that narration. This book is written from a first person’s point of view, Gene. So obviously, this narration is extremely unreliable. Being an adolescent, teenage boy, clearly things viewed with oddly colored lenses, especially odd to me as a 15 year old girl at the time. However, it seems that the book perfectly captured the idea of an unreliable narrator because Gene constantly goes back and forth in all of his jealousy of Phineas. There is an infamous description of the behind of his friend, and then at other times, Gene seems to be driven by an invisible force. Perhaps it is jealousy. It could also be the war (WWII) that throws everything off kilter (literally). The bottom line is that clearly, Gene is clearly going through some personal battles, and as readers, it is up to us to be responsible and sift through the details to figure out what is going on, even when Gene does not.

At the end of the day, I suppose I do agree with my VP. Every narrator is an unreliable narrator. I think that this speaks to the fact that every human being sees the world differently. One of the things that I admire most about literature is its ability to show how others see the world. Some authors even create their own world. However, any world that is inhabited by human beings is a world that has many different perspectives. So of course, every person has a story. Heck, even one person has different perspectives depending on the day. For example, the phrase “hindsight is always 20/20” perfectly illustrates how human beings have blindspots. The only being I know that has no blindspots is God. And so, every narrator is an unreliable narrator. If you have any other books of which narrations I could discuss, please do not hesitate to respond to this post! I love talking about literature!

Sincerest thanks,