Know Your Narrators
Each and Every Unreliable One of Them
This is a long-overdue post about different types of narrators, following up on a post from months ago now about narrative distance, which itself was inspired by a mental tangent on focal length and angle-of-view. This is ADHD at its most untreated. They did give me drugs for it one time but I was like “man, who has time to take all these drugs,” a thing high-school me never imagined I would say.
But before I introduce you to all my favorite narrators, I would be remiss if I did not say it is my partner’s birthday and he is the best around. There would be no Shelf Life without that guy because I would be crazy and sad and hungry because although I love to eat, I do not have the survival instinct to make sure I do it. Anyway if you see him say thanks for Shelf Life because if not for him I’d be in the kitchen trying to figure out how to fry an egg to survive instead of her, at my computer, with snacks.
He is also, incidentally, a great narrator. He has an inherent flair for drama and tells stories in an exciting way. Sometimes too exciting, and I have to interrupt him to make sure the dog is still alive or whatever before I let him carry on with the story.
Last time around, I gave a basic overview of the types of narrators you encounter in storytelling but the article was mainly on narrative distance, meaning, where you place the narrator’s perspective in the space between the reader and the character whose perspective the reader is getting—and also how much space you leave between them, at all. This article should probably have come first but whatever.
The narrator, as you know, is the person who is telling the story to the reader. That narrator may be a character in the story—either as the story is happening or at some point in the future looking back on events—or it may be an unnamed, disembodied presence observing events. Sometimes the narrator is the writer, as I am the narrator right now telling you a fun story about narrators (it’s not that fun, for you; it’s fun for me). Once you’ve figured out who your narrator is, then you can make a determination about narrative distance. Today we’re sorting out who is the narrator.
There are three components of the narrator themself—at least insofar as I think of it. Other people probably have different formulae. I don’t care. To arrive at the complete concept of your narrator you must determine their:
Perspective;
Breadth of Knowledge; and
Reliability.
With those components in place, you can begin to write from their perspective. Some of us—I think many writers—make these choices intuitively. We have a narrative voice that we’re most comfortable writing and we’ll gravitate to that one instinctively unless we make a point of choosing a different one. If I don’t think it through ahead of time, I will usually jump right into a first-person narrative from the perspective of the protagonist—especially if I am writing something short that I intend to finish in one sitting. Many times after knocking out a rough draft, I realize there’s a more engaging way to tell the same story and I’ll re-do it in a different way. I’m trying to put the thinking before the doing. Learn from my fail.
Perspective
Every narrator must have a point of view from which they speak: first person, second person, or third person.
The first-person narrator is one who speaks for themself, from inside their own head. This is the narrator who refers to the point-of-view character as “I” and “me.” We are privy to all of their thoughts, though not all of their knowledge unless they choose to share it with us. The first-person narrator is usually the main character or protagonist, but is not always. A first-person narrator may be telling their own story, or someone else’s.
A straightforward example of a first-person narrator is Katniss Everdeen, who tells the reader her own story from inside her skull, beginning:
“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.”
A first-person narrator who is not telling you their own story, for example, is Ishmael—he is the narrator of Moby Dick but not its main character. He’s not even there for all the action. He’s telling Ahab’s story. A more complicated example is Frankenstein, in which Robert Walton tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who he (Walton) quotes at some length in Frankenstein’s own words, including quotations from the Creature’s first-person perspective. A triple first-person narration. A franken-narrator. I know it’s a whole thing to refer to the Creature “Frankenstein” but you haven’t lived till you’ve called Robert Walton “Frankenstein” while giving your English professor an unblinking, dead-eyed stare.
The thing about your first-person narrator—any first-person narrator—is their perspective is limited to what they know and see and experience for themselves, or what they are told by others. Unless they are psychic or prophetic, they do not know what is going on with other characters in other places, or inside other characters’ heads. The first-person narrator is (nearly) always limited.
The seldom-seen second-person narrator is you, yourself, in the body and brain of a character in the story you are reading. This is the narrator who refers to the point-of-view character as “you.” Thus begins Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveler:
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room.”
I find second-person narration wildly uncomfortable to read and would probably find it just as uncomfortable to write, I don’t know, I’ve never tried. I suspect you can get away with a lot in a second-person narrative. The narrator—a fictional voice—is already telling the reader—an actual person—how they think, look, feel, and act. What can’t you do, then? It’s madness.
Finally, you have your third-person narrator: Probably the most popular. This is the narrator who refers to the point-of-view character—or any character—as “he,” “she,” “they,” and so on. The third-person narrator can be as close to your character’s thoughts as a first-person narrator, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.”
This third-person narrator is not the character Winston himself, but knows everything Winston knows and can report on everything Winston thinks. A third-person narrator can also observe from a great distance, recounting only what they observe and not the thoughts of others, making no assumptions about what characters may be thinking or what motivates them. For example, from The Two Towers:
“And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy.”
Those are the three perspectives from which the narrator may tell your story—first person, second person, third person. Next, you have to determine how much this narrator knows.
Breadth of Knowledge
Not all narrators are created equal. I mean, not all narrators have equal access to knowledge. For me, this is the most critical thing to consider when choosing a narrator: What information does the narrator need know in order for me to tell the story to my reader in the most compelling way.
Consider: A first-person narrator (like Katniss Everdeen) will only ever know what they experience directly or what they learn about indirectly by being told or overhearing. If Katniss falls out of a tree, she experiences that. If Peeta falls out of a tree nearby, she may experience that through seeing or hearing it. If somebody falls out of a tree on the other side of the arena and later tells her, that becomes part of her knowledge. But if somebody does something outside of her immediate vicinity and nobody tells her, she has no way to know. Other characters possess knowledge this narrator does not.
That’s true of limited third-person narration as well. Consider the Harry Potter series, which (except for the prologues which feature other point-of-view characters) track only Harry’s perspective. The reader learns information as Harry learns it. We almost never have information that Harry doesn’t have access to (although a careful reader will notice things Harry does not because he is oblivious to his surroundings).
Either way, when the narrator only has the breadth of information that is available to one character, narrative tension is created by revealing information to the reader slowly as the point-of-view character uncovers information.
An omniscient narrator, on the other hand, has access to all the information—everything going on everywhere in the world, every thought in every character’s head. This narrator has all the information the characters have, and might even have information the characters don’t have.
There are infinite degrees between fully omniscient and completely limited. The narrator of Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer is fairly omniscient, but is still limited by the sum of all knowledge the characters have. Although this narrator visits just about every character’s head and gives the reader perspectives of numerous characters with information, there are still things that no one in their world knows, answers which must be sought. Even when a narrator has access to all knowledge, that doesn’t mean the reader should be handed everything. If the past, present, and future are all fully known then how can there be a plot, anyway?
When choosing how much or how little information your narrator has access to, consider whether your point-of-view character has all the information necessary to tell the whole story. Are other characters holding back important information? If so, how will that be imparted to the reader? Do you want to drive narrative tension by withholding information from the reader? Or by withholding information from a character while allowing the reader to learn it? Different types of narrators can help you accomplish any of these.
Reliability
Best of all is the reliability of the narrator. Important: No narrator is completely reliable. They’re telling you a fictional story after all. It’s not real. Don’t trust them. Memoirists act like they’re telling you a true story but if it were true it’d be an autobiography now, wouldn’t it? The memoirist is one of the least reliable of all narrators. Don’t tell them that, though.
Narrative reliability is not a yes or no, but a spectrum. The most reliable narrator possible would be a distant, third-person omniscient narrator who knows everything and relates all of it as objectively as possible without coloring any part of the story with their own thoughts or preferences. I like to cite The Hobbit because it is told in a fairly straightforward way by a narrator who mostly observes Bilbo: They went here. They ate this. The Dwarves sang that. They came back again. It’s mostly objective although the narrator throws in their own commentary on events from time to time, for example,
“I should not have liked to have been in Mr. Baggins’ place, all the same. The tunnel seemed to have no end. All he knew was that it was still going down pretty steadily and keeping in the same direction in spite of a twist and a turn or two.”
It’s only later on, and outside the text, that we learn the narrator of events was Bilbo himself, many years after the fact. Although he purports to be telling events truthfully, can we trust him? First of all it was a long time ago. Second of all, is it possible he remembers himself and his actions in a more favorable light than his companions remember him? And third, why did he take steps to distance himself the narrator from himself the character?
Even a narrator who is trying their best to tell a story faithfully and objectively can encounter obstacles to that endeavor. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, for example, is legitimately mentally ill. He’s traumatized during childhood by the death of his friend, Annabel, and thereafter finds himself attracted only to young girls. Worse, while he’s aware enough to attempt to hide his pedophilia, he doesn’t feel any remorse for it, or consider his actions morally wrong. Anything he might tell us about Lolita’s behavior and his interpretation of it is completely suspect.
Another unreliable narrator in that vein is Benjy Compson from The Sound and the Fury, who due to intellectual disability recalls events in a nonlinear way, tells events out of order that limit the reader’s understanding of the Compson family’s downfall until later in the the narrative.
Then you have the narrator who is outright attempting to mislead you for whatever reason. Amy Dunne, from Gone Girl, misleads the reader so they will sympathize with her against her husband. Pi Patel, from Life of Pi, lies to the reader to create an elaborate thought experiment on the nature of grief and survival. Sometimes the narrator is lying to you because they’re a little jerk and they like jerking people around like Briony Tallis in Atonement. She did not win any points from me by making me watch that whole Kiera Knightley movie. If she feels bad about something, it should be wasting my time.
Given that your narrator is doomed to unreliability of some sort, think about where their failure of truthfulness will come and what will cause it. The reason for a narrator’s unreliability is a big part of their likability, too: Most people aren’t aware of everything at every moment. Our blind spots make us relatable. Everybody’s blind spots except Briony’s.
That’s all you need to set the stage for your compelling narrator: their perspective, their range of knowledge, and their degree of reliability. Oh yeah and their voice, no big deal. Just the most important thing. I’ll put it on the important things for other days list or perhaps the things I should have lead with list.
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