Flowers for Algernon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his unreliability. A more common, and dramatic, use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces the reader to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In many cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.
The literary device of the unreliable narrator should not be confused with other devices such as euphemism, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, personification, sarcasm, or satire, in which the narrator is credible, but the narrator's words cannot be taken literally. Similarly, historical novels, speculative fiction, and clearly delineated dream sequences are generally not considered instances of unreliable narration, even though they describe events that did not or could not happen.
Novels
One of the earliest known examples of unreliable narration is Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In the Merchant's Tale, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, allows his misogynistic bias to slant much of his tale.
Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience can impair their judgment and make them unreliable. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; even going so far as to accuse his author, "Mr. Mark Twain," of having stretched the truth in the previous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an early example of a fourth-wall breach. In contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.
Another class of unreliable narrator is one who intentionally attempts to deceive the audience or other characters in the story. One of the earliest examples is Agatha Christie's detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the narrator is scrupulously honest in facts revealed but neglects to mention certain key events.
In some cases, as with Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 Pale Fire, the reader is unable to discern among several possible narrators, each with his or her own intrinsically unreliable agenda and bias. This serves to effectively include the reader in the experience of the novel, rather than simply providing a narrative, encouraging independent theories and ultimately furthering a point.
Gene Wolfe could be said to have made the unreliable narrator one of his stylistic signatures. The most famous example is the complicated and self-contradictory autobiography of the Autarch Severian, who claims to possess eidetic memory, in The Book of the New Sun. Narrators in others of Wolfe's books include a soldier who loses his entire memory every morning (Soldier of the Mist) and a combination of multiple personalities sharing one body (Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun).
The eponymous narrator of Michael Moorcock's Pyat Quartet is thoroughly and entertainingly duplicitous.
Randy Mulray, the main character in C.W. Schultz’s novel Yeval, easily qualifies as an unreliable narrator. The reader grows to know that Mulray is a very self-conscious man with a low self-esteem, which in turn makes him obviously overplay (or underplay) situations that he describes to the reader. Because he is a drug-dealer and envisions thoughts of a serial killer, there are several hints throughout the novel that Mulray could be hallucinating some of what he tells.
Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon has a narrator, Charley, who could also be considered unreliable. Charley is mentally retarded, and his descriptions of events in his life reveal a very limited understanding of events around him. His vocabulary and understanding improve when an experimental treatment radically increase his intelligence, only to decline again in the final section of the novel.
In some instances, unreliable narration can bring about the fantastic in works of fiction. In Kingsley Amis's The Green Man, for example, the unreliability of the narrator Maurice Allington destabilizes the boundaries between reality and the fantastic. The same applies to Nigel Williams's Witchcraft.
