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Why Do Writers Use Unreliable Narrators?
The device works brilliantly when it succeeds. But it can bring a book down when it doesn’t
Unreliable narration — the use of a storyteller we can’t fully trust — helps to explain the appeal of books as different as Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
But why do fiction writers use the device when most of us can relate to more easily to narrators we can trust? Do they do it for the shock value that comes with finishing a story and realizing that the teller has given us a skewed version of events? Or for a literary purpose that goes beyond that?
Whatever the reason, the device can cause outrage, as Agatha Christie discovered after writing her 1926 mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Christie’s novel has won high acclaim: In 2013, the British Crime Writers’ Association voted it the best crime novel of all time. But its narrative technique at first enraged readers who felt cheated by it. A less skilled novelist might not have pulled if off.
