1/14/2024 0 Comments Poe on narrator point of view![]() ![]() In these cases, the narrator’s unreliability stems from a lack of experience, they’re being manipulated by someone else, or they have completely wrong information to work from. The first and one of the most common kinds of unreliable narrators is the unintentionally unreliable narrator, sometimes referred to as a naif. Narrators can be unreliable in a number of ways, but we can narrow it down into four basic categories of ineptitude. Unreliable narrators have different reasons for why their accounts of events differ from a more objective truth, and come in a few different types. Booth, who coined the term in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction. While this literary device has been in use for as long as stories have existed, our modern term for it comes from literary critic Wayne C. But what if the person telling us the story can’t be trusted? What if facts are being misrepresented to make us sympathetic to the narrator’s point of view? When the narrative being told does not line up with “what really happened” (quotes as by definition nothing in fiction “really happened”) you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. In most fiction, the main character telling the story is a reliable narrator – readers can trust the version of events being provided is an accurate representation of that universe’s reality. Here’s what you need to know about telling your audience lies for fun. They can be subversive, tragic, hilarious, or downright villainous, and they’re a great way to give your audience something to enjoy on a re-read. Unreliable narrators are some of the most fun an author can have with their audience’s expectations. With a defense like that, we immediately know that we can’t trust this man. It hits like a ton of bricks - we’re watching a madman defend the murder of his employer based on the idea that, in his head, he was morally right. But you should have seen me…I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.” One of my favorite openings to any story is from the third paragraph of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart: ![]()
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