At the end, viewers are left to make up their own minds as to which account is the true one. The film has three different narrators relate their own version of a story about the death of a samurai, but each story differs markedly and attributes the death to a different cause. One of the classic examples of the unreliable narrator influencing the form of a story is actually a film, Akira Kuroshawa’s Rashomon. The impressions of a protagonist formed by other characters can differ, making the truth of the character’s life difficult to know. Unreliable narrators do not have to be written in the first person necessarily. Untruthful narrators can also be used to shape narrative form: Using unreliable narrators to create interesting narrative form In Never Let Me Go, the unreliable narrator similarly keeps the reader guessing about what is going on and what kind of a world the narrator is inhabiting until the book’s later shocking surprise. The two are not just unreliable narrators in terms of how they present themselves to the reader but in how they present themselves to everyone else in their lives. In Gone Girl, the reader keeps reading to find out what really happened, what the real story is behind the facades presented by the two narrators.
Unreliable narrator examples full#
Kathy also withholds information from the reader although this is because in the first part of the book she is writing about a time when she did not have full information about the reality of her disturbing situation. This creates a kind of unreliability as well because the reader is left to piece things together from clues Kathy drops without her fully comprehending their importance herself. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, the narrator, Kathy, acknowledges that she is reconstructing events from memory and that they may not be entirely accurate. There are many more examples of unreliable narrators that are introduced to create suspense. Examples of unreliable narration: Creating narrative suspense In Gone Girl, a couple describes their relationship in alternating chapters so differently that the reader suspects at least one of them is unreliable, and then one character outright admits to being untruthful. In the first pages of a book like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert’s justification of his lust for young girls signals to the reader that he is not to be trusted. What is an unreliable narrator? This is a narrator (usually narrating in the first person) who is discovered to be an unreliable source of ‘the truth’ or trustworthy information in a story. Here are some ways that unreliable narrators can be used to shape a novel’s form or to surprise and build tension in the reader: What is an unreliable narrator?
The unreliable narrator is a useful fiction device for creating surprise in your story and avoiding predictability.
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