Episode: 2728
Title: HPR2728: The Unreliable Narrator In Storytelling
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2728/hpr2728.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 15:46:31

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This is HBR episode 2007-128 entitled The Unreliable Narrator in Storytelling and in part
on the series Random Elements on Storytelling.
It is hosted by Lost in Drunks and in about 14 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summer is Lost in Drunks looks at unreliable narrators and narrative techniques in stories.
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Hello, this is Lost in Drunks and you'll have to forgive the audio quality I'm in the car right now.
Today I would like to talk about the concept of the unreliable narrator in Storytelling.
Now if you're not familiar with this, this is basically a narrator or a dominating character who we can't trust.
But perhaps we don't know that right away or maybe we don't know that until the very end.
A character that perhaps is lying to us or lying to themselves or just by virtue of the plot of the story is lying to everyone.
And that doesn't become clear at all until the end of the story.
Now what do I mean? Are there hard examples? Well there are some good fairly recent examples that mostly everybody knows.
The entire concept of the story, the usual suspects, the film revolves around the unreliable narrator.
That species character in that is spinning this elaborate tale concerning murder and theft and betrayal and ambition and greed.
And it isn't until the very end that we find out that probably none of it is true.
Not a single bit of it may be actual, that nothing we just saw may in fact have any meaning whatsoever.
Well there's a recurring villain in that film called Kaiser Soze, who we only hear about through his stories.
And many people have interpreted the structure of the film at the very end that he, in fact, is Kaiser Soze.
But that's not explicit. If you go back and watch that film, you realize that there may not be a Kaiser Soze.
They may not, none of it may be real. It all might be a lie that he has spawned masterfully to the police in order to walk out a free man.
Now that's one example. Another much more recent example is Mr. Robot, the TV show.
In the first season of Mr. Robot, he tells us lots and lots of things about himself and about the world around him.
And it isn't until a good portion of the story through that we realize that he is living in a dream world this guy.
He doesn't know necessarily what's true and what isn't.
And he sees characters that aren't there, he remembers things, he forgets things, left and right.
All of this makes him an unreliable narrator and yet he's the one guiding us through this tale.
Now, narrator can be taken to a literal meaning such as something like Mr. Robot, but it can have other levels, at least within the context of this conversation.
Not only will I include people that are actually narrating the story, actually telling you, literally telling you the tale, but I will include characters that we are following as the main character.
There may not be an actual narrator in the story. We're just following these people.
And because we're following them, we tend to give them a great deal of credit.
We tend to believe that what they're saying is true. We're following their story and we're supposed to believe it.
Whatever it is they're doing, we're buying it because this is the main character.
But then you find out that this character is crazy. Then you find out that this character doesn't know what they're doing.
Fight Club is one of those where you find out the guy is nuts at the end.
There are plenty of stories like this where you can't trust what's going on.
You don't understand necessarily that any of this stuff is real.
And that is a character that isn't telling you, per se, telling you the story.
The story is being told around them. We're following these guys, but we shouldn't be because they can't be trusted.
Their story is off the rails. It's either a lie or it's a fantasy or something else entirely.
Something else entirely.
Now what's the advantage of having an unreliable narrator?
Well, it allows the writer of the story to lie directly to the audience, or the viewer, or the reader, or whatever.
Whatever, whatever the form of the story happens to be.
Unreliable narrators have appeared in all sorts of literature and it can range from something somewhat mild and symbolic like in Catcher in the Rye.
All the way up to nightmarish versions of reality as shown in stuff like Gus, Waterhouse 5, and things like that.
In other words, the concept of unreliability, it can scale, and the effect you're trying to achieve in your story, can scale with it.
So you could have a story and a narrator, and again, narrators kind of a loose term in this context.
You can have a story and a narrator that are either only slightly wrong so that you can misdirect your reader, or it can be way off.
It can be way way off so that they don't realize until the very end that the whole thing was an elaborate illusion.
Now, that can be seen as gimmicky, and indeed, if you don't use it to tell a coherent story, it absolutely is gimmicky.
All it does is provide shock at the end.
Not shock is, and I'm shocked and horrified, but shock is, and oh, I didn't see that coming!
And that is gimmicky. You can't do that more than once.
You end up with something like the sixth sense, the film, by M. Night Shyamalan.
That is an unreliable narrator in this context.
This is a main character. We're following Bruce Willis' character throughout that whole thing, and it isn't until the very end that we realize he has been lying to himself the whole time.
See, again, I'm adding that sort of character to this conversation because the effect is the same.
If he was sitting there telling somebody else this story, it would be the exact same effect.
So in this conversation, we're going to go forward with that idea that this guy cannot be trusted, but we don't know that until the very end.
That's often just called a twist ending simply because there wasn't a direct narrator, but the effect is exactly the same.
The only difference is that we don't see the shock on the person's face who the story is being told to.
The way we did in, say, the usual suspects. We get to see, at the very, very end, the police figure out the whole story has been a lie, and we get to see that.
And when he sees it, we understand that the whole thing was nothing but a tale, nothing but a story being told the lie.
So, yes, it can be gimmicky or it can be very powerful depending on how it's told.
It works really well in mysteries. It works really well in thrillers.
It works really well in sort of spy type stories, even if they're not mysterious or thrilling, per se.
It could be much more plotting, like, say, a John McCarray story like the Smiley stories.
Now, that technique was not used in those stories, but it could be.
You could have a story that really takes its time and really stretches everything out and still flip everything on its head at the very end.
So, that is a danger. It can indeed be gimmicky, but what are the strengths?
Well, right off the bat, it can be shocking. It can have a nice, beautiful twist, a nice jolt at the very end where we didn't see it coming.
So, that's a beauty. That's one nice thing.
If the unreliability of the narrator is telegraphed early, that sets up the entire story to have this sort of unsettling quality to it.
Because we're not shocked as we go along and we find out that our main character, perhaps our narrator, our literal narrator can't be trusted.
That could happen very early, but we're not shocked by it because we're not that invested in the story, the plot, or the characters just yet.
But then, if it continues, even after we know we can't trust this person, if it continues and it's explicit, we have no idea what's real.
And knowing that as the story progresses can have a very unsettling effect.
This sort of technique works really well in horror films, psychological thrillers, and that sort of thing.
Where the main character is, perhaps, unstable, or maybe unstable, or maybe seeing ghosts, or that sort of thing, we don't know what's true.
Because the main character doesn't know what's true, and it gives the entire thing an unsettling, irrequality that's above anything, like say, if it's a film,
the sound affects the music, the way the thing is filmed, and the portrayal of the characters by the actors, and the writing.
On top of all of this stuff, you have the structure of the story that is making the entire thing a little bit eerie, a little bit off.
You just don't know what's going on because the main characters don't know.
That's one way to approach it.
Another one is to have a similar story and have a main character who is deliberately trying to fool everybody, and we know it.
We know they can't be trusted, and we're held in suspense because this character could do anything.
Especially if it's been shown early on that this is a despicable character who is capable of doing terrible things.
When they start lying left and right, lying to us, lying to the other characters in this story, the entire experience keeps us on edge because we don't know what's coming next.
We don't know what they're going to do, we don't know what they're going to say.
So those are two advantages.
Another one is if you are allowing yourself to inject fantasy into the story, and it doesn't have to be fantasy like elves and fairies.
It could be fantasy in the character's head, it could be fantasy in someone else's head, or it could be something like a musical sequence.
If you can inject some sort of fanciful element to the story, it allows you to tell another dimension to this tale.
It allows you to bring in other elements so that you can start illustrating things more symbolically.
You can perhaps add a great deal of humor that way.
You can use other techniques by simply running with the concept that the main character, the narrator, whatever, whatever it is they're telling you it's not true.
And if that is known and understood right off the bat, then you can make use of that technique within that fanciful element.
Now the fantasy, again, it doesn't have to necessarily be unreal.
It could be something as simple as remembering somebody and their memory of this person we get to see it on the screen.
And I think it was the fourth season of the Scandinavian television series, Braun, a new character was introduced.
And this character spends several episodes talking to his wife.
He comes home, he talks to his wife, they seem to have a loving relationship, and then he goes out and he picks up women at a bar.
And she encourages him to do so.
So it's a very strange relationship and we have no idea what's going on.
They seem to be so happy and yet he goes out and does this and actually seems quite miserable doing it.
So why is he doing it?
Well, he's doing it because she's not really there.
She's a memory, she's gone, she's out of his life and he remembers her the way he last saw her.
But we don't get that information.
During these scenes, we are following this character.
We are letting him lead our story.
He is our, for lack of a better term, he is our narrator and he can't be trusted because he sees his wife as if she's still there.
He talks to her, he tells her about his day, he tells her about all the wonderful things they're going to do together.
He's not crazy, he's grief-stricken and that's established in this story.
But other characters might be crazy.
Other characters might continue to talk to someone who's not there for a very long time and we never hear about it.
Well, speaking of hearing about it, I guess this is just a very brief discussion about a pretty complex narrative technique or it can be.
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