Vicki also came away from Gone Girl with a bad taste in her mouth for unreliability - although she’s still trying to figure out if that reaction stemmed from the fact that both narrators were unreliable or that both were, as she put it, “awful people.” Both narrators recounted their stories in first-person and both were untrustworthy characters and narrators. She told me reading Gone Girl certainly didn’t help. The flip side of Cindy’s willingness to more easily trust an omniscient narrator is that she more easily mistrusts a first-person account. After all, their purpose in sharing their writing is to share their unique perspectives. On the other hand, Cindy, Vicki, and I agree that when it comes to memoirs, we’re likely to believe the narrator’s intention is to be reliable. As I was discussing Lolita with my husband and Staci, we agreed that the nature of its theme - centered around an obsession most readers would consider abhorrent - could have made it easier to perceive its narrator, Humbert Humbert, as unreliable. Perhaps content and themes are stronger factors in our perceptions of reliability.

Jenny, who writes both narrators who are intentionally unreliable and ones who try to be reliable, told me that as a reader, she prefers unreliable narrators because she enjoys the opportunity to “engage at a deeper level with a story and feel like I’m a part of it instead of just a passive bystander.” Jenny cited the realist literary title, Lolita, as an example of an unreliably narrated story that invites readers to think more deliberately about their own value systems. My husband and our friend, Staci, who also both read a lot of realist fiction, told me they relish an unreliable narrator, too. Cindy told me that it’s become exhausting and distracting to have to constantly question narrators instead of simply enjoying the story. This might be because she’s been reading so many thrillers, a genre that’s embraced an unreliable narration trend in titles like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and My Sweet Girl among others. Cindy told me that she’s been craving more reliability in narrators recently. Do Factors Like Genre, Themes, and POV Affect Our Perceptions of Reliability? GenreĪlthough genre doesn’t necessarily determine whether a reader will or won’t perceive a narrator as reliable, I discovered that sometimes genre affects readers’ desire for reliability. Omniscient narrators, she explained to me, don’t have any stakes in the storyline, which means they don’t have a need to manipulate facts in order to promote an agenda. While all of us agreed that reliable narration is a reader’s perception about the narrator’s intentions, my friend Cindy told me there is definitely one type of narrator she perceives as more reliable: an omniscient one.

Exactly how do you define a reliable narrator? Does your perception of the reliability depend on specific factors such as genre and theme or the point-of-view and identity of the narrator? And after you explore the possible answers to those questions, a follow up question arises: Does it even matter whether a narrator is reliable?

It’s a question that, frankly, brings up even more questions. That is a really good question.” And now your head is spinning and you’re suddenly thinking about all the books you’ve read that weren’t told by intentionally deceptive narrators and wondering whether all those narrators really could have been entirely reliable. If you’re like me and most of the other avid readers I’ve talked to, your first reaction to this question isn’t a categorical “yes” or “no.” It’s probably more along the lines of, “Huh. When she isn’t knee-deep in words or marathon training, she’s hanging out with her smart, funny husband and their two extremely opinionated dogs. Her writing has been featured in The Dallas Morning News, Running Room Magazine, The Bookwoman, and on stage at LitNight Dallas and the Oral Fixation live storytelling show. Stacey Megally is a writer, runner, and incurable bookworm.

Reliable narrator definition poetry