RANT ABOUT UNRELIABLE NARRATORS (buckle up for the long ride, folks, but I promise it’ll be worth it):
First-person narrators are always unreliable to some extent, because no human is infallible; human unreliability is inevitable. But the reliability of first-person narrators varies greatly. There’s a false perception of reality caused by insanity, like Jane in "The Yellow Wallpaper," who does not know she is hallucinating. A different kind of this is a narrator who has an almost imperceptibly skewed perception of reality, like Patroclus in Song of Achilles who portrays himself as squeamish, cowardly, weak, and unintelligent, when in fact he has the stomach, skill, and courage to swiftly and expertly tend to wounded soldiers, and was even able to pass as Achilles, the "best of the Greeks," in battle, or Bella Swan in The Twilight Saga who thinks of herself as ugly and unremarkable and is surprised when almost every boy in Forks shows attraction to her. Then there’s Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, who is lying not only to the reader but to himself; he knows deep down that Gatsby is a bad person, but he chooses to keep his rose-coloured glasses on and try to immortalize his crush in a positive manner, which is more than Gatsby really deserves. This sort of brushing the truth aside and attempts at gaining the readers' trust is a subtle but purposeful form of unreliable narration, and it’s notiseable if you look deep enough into it. Nelly Dean from Wuthering Heights also does this, as her strong feelings about the characters lead her to tell the story in a biased way. Then there’s . . . pretty much everybody in The Vampire Chronicles, who all tell such different versions of the same story that I don’t know whether to trust Lestat, Louis, Armand, or Marius more, because I know they’re all lying to me in some way, shape, or form, at almost all times. Anyway unreliable narrators are fun.
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