Don’t make the mistake of creating a lying narrator with no payoff. You can use one of these narrators to develop your theme, build tension in your plot, or set up a plot twist. Use Unreliable Narrators for one of the three reasons above. Verbal Kent, the movie’s narrator, is revealed to have lied about the entire plot in the climax.
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR DEFINITION MOVIE
This technique is used well in the movie The Usual Suspects. Plot twists will make your narrative more interesting. Once revealed, this lie will act as a third act twist. Unreliable narrators can fabricate a big lie at the heart of your story. The purpose of an unreliable narrator is to introduce a story question. Read more about that movie in my post about non-linear narratives here.Īgain, if the author creates an intriguing narrator, the reader will stick with the text to find the story’s truth. In this film, the hero has no long term memory making his retelling of events suspect. In these cases, the reader will pay closer attention to the text and question the story’s events.Īn excellent example of this would be in the film Memento. Sometimes a reader will know from the beginning that a narrator is unreliable, like when the narrator is a child. In short, this technique can force a reader to think harder about a story. Unreliable narrators can spur, in your reader, a thoughtfulness about your story that they otherwise wouldn’t have. When done expertly, an unreliable narrator will cause the reader to reexamine the events of the story.Ī narrator who has lied may cause a reader to question their assumptions and beliefs. When an unreliable narrator is discovered, by the reader, to be a liar, it puts all the plot events into question.
To be effective, unreliable narrators have to have a purpose behind their lying, that is revealed in the plot. Don’t use a dishonest narrator as a “gotcha” on the reader or to try and fool your reader for no reason. When done poorly, an unreliable narrator will have no purpose behind their lying. The information suppressed by the narrator would give the reader a broader context or reveal a complete story.ĭue to their control of story information, authors can use narrators to control plot pacing and set up significant reveals. An unreliable narrator will hide information from the reader. The narrator acts as a filter through which all the information in the story passes. Unreliable narrators will also set up major plot twists in a story, like in the climax of the film The Usual Suspects. Learn about first-person point of view here! How does an unreliable narrator affect a story?Īn unreliable narrator will cause the reader to question a story’s events, like the fantastic events of a novel like Forrest Gump. In these cases, the author is often using the narrator to set up some major plot twists. A naive narrator could have a skewed perspective with no awareness of it.īut, other times, narrators are just lying to the reader. Sometimes a narrator is either too young or naive to know they are lying. There plenty of reasons why a narrator might lie to a reader, and not all those reasons are malicious. If you’re unsure what that means, check out this article on the first-person point of view. Unreliable narrators are typically used in a story that has a first-person point of view. An unreliable narrator is hiding essential story details, or they are outright lying about them. Unreliable narrators are perspective characters, telling a story but not telling the reader the whole story. We’ll talk about those reasons and much more, but first, let’s answer one crucial question. And, while it’s never good to lie in your real life, there are plenty of reasons to employ an unreliable narrator in your writing life. We’ll get into those reasons further down. We’re even lied to in literature, and when that happens, we call it an unreliable narrator.Īn unreliable narrator is a point of view character who you can’t trust for one reason or another. Have you ever been lied to, deceived, or ripped off? Of course, you have! Unfortunately, we’ve all fallen prey to a lie at some point in our lives.
0 kommentar(er)
