Unreliable Narrators

The topic of the unreliable narrator comes up quite frequently in college writing classes. We'll read a novel or a short story - always of the 'literary' variety, of course - and in class, the professor will ask if we can fully trust the narrator and there will be a strange mixture of quiet nods and quiet headshaking, with no one or very few people wanting to actually answer the question. The answer is usually no, as over the past month or so of digging quite deeply into literary fiction I've decided that one of its defining features is extreme closeness to the protagonist*, so by nature of that the reader cannot believe everything that is said. If everything is seen solely through the lens of one character's perspective (sometimes two), not everything that that character thinks or feels will be the truth.

But what about a character who deliberately misleads the reader? Someone who lies all the time, perhaps, or someone who has a lot to hide.

I played with this idea a little bit in Letters to Oliver, but although individual characters did not necessarily have the whole story, the reader did, because the reader was privy to all of Emily's letters and could see what things she was concealing from which people. That's my favorite part about the epistolary format, and something I've talked at great length about in my historical fiction class - when we view a character through what they write down to send to another character, what they conceal, from whom, and why says even more about them than what they do say.

But I'm in a bit of a predicament now. I need to start working on my final project for historical fiction (which I think will also become my next novel project, if it goes well), and the main character, Maire, might possibly be a pathological liar. However, I have no idea how to pull this off in third person format. (Or regular first person narration, really, but that's less of a problem because I hate writing in first person that isn't epistolary.)

Do you guys have any suggestions? Recommendations for books or stories I could look at? Stern comments telling me that I am out of my mind and should drop the idea altogether? Anything you have to say would be most welcome.

Also, a related question: how do you feel about unreliable narrators in fiction? Do you like them? Hate them? What's your preferred format - a narrator who is unreliable to the characters around them but not to the reader, or a narrator who obscures everything for everyone involved? Have you ever written such a character?

All right, I think that's quite enough questions for your Tuesday. Have a lovely day!



*The point of this post is not to discuss literary vs. genre fiction. That is a can of worms I have to open on a near-daily basis in class and would rather leave quite alone.

Teaser Tuesday: The Snow Queen, part 2

Thanks so much for your feedback on the beginning of my short story, everyone! You don't mind if I post a little bit more of it, do you? If you like, I'll post the ending next Tuesday. Because you guys are awesome.

This is from the end of the middle, when Grace goes out looking for Kade. In the original story, the little girl has all sorts of helpers on her quest to find her friend, but I cut it down to just one - I hope it makes sense! Constructive criticism is more than welcome!

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The sky that poked through in lines broken by the taller buildings was a dull grey, the kind of sky that threatened snow. Grace wanted to find him before those soft flakes began to fall; she didn’t think she could drag him away from the destructive cold if it put on the guise of beauty for him.

Grace turned a corner and the wind nearly lifted her off her feet; it rattled off of garbage cans and whistled around street signs. Was that what the singing sounded like to Kade? Did that clatter of chaotic noise make sense in his head? She turned onto the street and walked into the wind, feeling as though a hand were pressing into her face, trying to stop her from following her friend.

She fought the wind for several blocks, her small frame almost bent double against the rush of air that raced down the avenue. Other people around her were having almost as much difficulty; she saw scarves whipped down the street and coats billowing out behind their owners, or else plastered to their legs, tripping them up in the force of the icy wind. Manhattan became a wind tunnel in the wintertime; those gusts were the perfect place for Kade’s voices to lurk. But after she had walked down what felt like the entire island, she ducked into a side street, shivering violently, desperate to catch her breath and warm her hands out of the merciless wind.

A few feet away from her, a cardboard box had overturned on the sidewalk. She would not have paid any attention to it, but it jerked suddenly, catching her eye and causing her to jump away from it. She watched it scuttle along the ground for a moment before cautiously stepping forward and popping it off the ground with her foot. When she kicked the box away, it left a confused and startled pigeon behind. The bird flapped about, walking in circles as though it half expected to find itself still trapped.

“It’s okay,” she said, “you’re okay. I let you go. I rescued you, just like I’m going to rescue Kade.”

Grace thought that perhaps the wind might be getting to her as well now, if she was talking to a pigeon, but even though she had spent her whole life in the city and seen pigeons every day, she had never seen one stop and listen to a person before. But her pigeon had definitely stopped flapping and turned its head towards her.

“I wish you were a carrier pigeon so I could send a message to him. Maybe he’d let me know where he was, at least.”

She sighed, sitting down on the curb a few feet from the pigeon, blowing into her frozen hands. The pigeon cooed softly a few times, then walked in front of her as if it was trying to get her attention. Then it launched itself into the air and flew down the alley, doubling back once and circling around her head. It wanted her to follow.

“If Kade thinks the wind calls to him, I can follow a pigeon, right?” Grace muttered to herself as she got to her feet and ran down the sidewalk after the little grey bird.

The pigeon seemed to have even more trouble with the wind than she did, but she was grateful; the gusts kept the bird from flitting out of her sight. Bits of ice or rain or snow swatted at her cheeks now, and either she had been out in the cold too long or the sound that the wind-rattled trash cans made sounded like go back, Grace, go back. He’s ours now. But Kade was hers, and she would get him back, even if she went crazy doing it.

Teaser Tuesday: The Snow Queen

Yes, it's Teaser Tuesday! No, this is not from the secret wip. What I have been working on is a short story for my Fiction II class. We had to choose a fairy tale and adapt it. I chose Hans Christian Anderson's story The Snow Queen, and I would love to get some feedback from you guys. You know that I never write contemporary, and I've never tried something like this, so while I like the concept, I'm a little unsure of myself here. I don't workshop for quite a while, so any feedback you feel like giving me is most welcome.

Here are the first two pages or so. I hope you enjoy them!

The Snow Queen

The first day Kade wasn’t in school, Grace didn’t worry. He had been skipping school a lot lately, more and more as the weather got colder, the fierce wind ripping through Manhattan’s streets and sneaking under upturned collars and snug-fitting hats like bony fingers. It was an ice-cold caress that Grace tried to ignore, but this winter, sometimes it seemed that Kade was drawn to it.

She had confronted him about it, once, when he had missed two days in a row at the beginning of November. She had gone to his apartment, one door over from her own, intending to give him a teacher-style lecture about missing school and falling behind on homework and tests, about how that would affect his future in all sorts of bad ways now that he was in high school. But she wound up giving him a different lecture, when she discovered that he was alone in the apartment, sitting on the window ledge in his t-shirt and shorts, leaning into the cold gusts of wind that blew down their street. It might have been funny, if he hadn’t been tipping forward, millimeter by millimeter leaning farther over the dizzying edge, second by second creeping towards a seven-story fall.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Grace had shrieked, without thinking.

Kade had turned, surprised to see her, and he wobbled; Grace flung herself forward and hauled his thin frame back through the window, letting him topple onto the floor of his bedroom.

“I like it,” he’d said, grumbling as he rubbed at his head where it had banged on the floor. “I like the cold. It’s like the wind is calling me when I sit out there, asking me to come with her-”

“What are you smoking?” she had asked, automatically turning to his desk, pulling open a drawer to search for something offending, some monstrous white powder that was tearing her childhood friend away from her.

“You’re not my mother, Grace,” he snapped, shoving her away from the desk. “And you don’t care what happens to me any more than she does. You just don’t want your friend to be crazy, to be found broken in a pile on the street because you don’t want any stain on your perfect future-”

“Well, excuse me for saving your life!” she shouted, storming off, making sure to slam the door behind her.

So the first day didn’t worry her. Not when the January wind was coated in snow, when she knew those fingers would lovingly tear at his skin, when the wind would be calling him in a voice that glittered like sun through ice.

But then one day became two, which melted on into three, then four, then a whole week. By Thursday, she was worried, and not just because the seniors were more inclined to knock the stack of books out of her hands when Kade was not around. He had disappeared before, but never for as long as a week.

Friday afternoon, she crept down the hall to his apartment and knocked softly on his green-painted door, a packet of missed assignments tucked under her arm. No one answered the door, and after waiting for five minutes, she turned the knob and let herself in.

Kade’s parents were not home – they were almost never home – but Kade was nowhere to be found either. Grace left the makeup work on the kitchen table and poked her head into Kade’s room. It was a mess, with clothes and books thrown every which way; she found one of his favorite paperbacks sitting in a corner, the cover bent, as though he had tried to find some comfort in it but had hurled it aside. His window was wide open, icicles beginning to drip down towards the sill, and Grace shut it, shivering, not daring to look at the pavement below. Surely if he had fallen, she would have known. She lived next door, as she had all her life – surely someone would tell her.