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My book club argued for 45 minutes over whether the unreliable narrator in that mystery was cheating us
A few years back I would have just shrugged and moved on, but after we read 12 different books with dodgy narrators last year I started tracking how often authors pull that trick. Has anyone else kept a tally on how many books in your club use an unreliable narrator?
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alicec867d agoMost Upvoted
Is it just me or does that debate sound a lot like how we all kind of rewrite our own stories when we're telling friends about something that happened? That whole "my version of events" thing is basically the same trick, just way less dramatic.
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shane7518d ago
Listened to a great episode of The History of Literature podcast that broke down how unreliable narrators have been around way longer than people realize. They pointed out that even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from the 1300s has narrators who clearly twist the truth to make themselves look better. For fiction in general, probably about 15-20 percent of modern novels use some kind of unreliable narrator. My book club read The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl back to back and that was like a double feature in narrator untrustworthiness. Kept a tally on a napkin somewhere but it got thrown out when we switched meeting spots.
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