"Since you have preserved my narration... I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity." - Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
There are a number of texts which touch on the idea of unreliable narrators. They could be biased, they may not have all the information, they may be recounting events which they never witnessed, and are therefore only speculating. In some cases, narrators have a completely different view on events, as in the case of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, in which the narrator is autistic and reports on the events around him quite differently, with very specific details on things which other narrators would likely pass by. There is also the possibility of the work itself being tampered with if, for instance, the frame of the story is that of a diary or a series of letters, they could have been altered by another character within the story. When studying Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, my English teacher encouraged us to question the validity of Marian's recount through diary extracts as, at the end of her entries, the villain, Count Fosco, writes in her diary. We were led to suspect that her diary had been altered, possibly with entire passages removed by Fosco in order to protect him from being exposed for the crimes he committed.
When characters recount events in which much dialogue takes place, I have always been sceptical as to whether or not the narrator would really be able to take in all the information at the time and report it back perfectly, word for word. If I were to write down a conversation that took place several hours before, I probably wouldn't use quotations and instead use flimsy phrases like 'he said it was a bad idea' because I would be unable to remember his exact wording. Then again, people in real life rarely have the ability to speak so eloquently and with such rich subtext as many novels will have you believe, so some suspension of disbelief is required. Referring back to The Woman in White, Marian's recounts through her diary entries are somewhat justified in having the dialogue flawlessly replicated by her natural gift of a photographic memory, but many other texts seem to imply that characters just remember exactly how every event happened. Apparently they were that impacting and memorable. Or perhaps I'm going prematurely senile.
When reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein I started to wonder, as the story progressed, how reliable this narration was, as these events were being recounted by more and more narrators. To clarify, at one point in the story, the monster is telling Frankenstein his tale, which Frankenstein dictated to Walton, who was writing the tale in the form of a letter to his sister. Then later, during the monster's tale, he begins retelling the tale of Felix and Safie. I reached the point where it just started to seem ridiculous. I couldn't know at this point if any of the narrative would be accurate as I was reading it, because it had been through three different narrators before it got to Walton's letter, which I was supposedly reading. My suspension of disbelief was strained at best. Then I read a passage in the last chapter in which Walton explains how Frankenstein amended his account, to fix any mistakes, to ensure that the correct story would go down in history. Despite it not being a particularly pressing concern, this did make it seem more believable. Luckily Shelley is a good enough writer that it didn't bother me enough for me to be distracted all through the novel.
So next time you're reading a book, think about what it is that you're actually reading. How reliable do you think your narrator is? Is it a first-person narrative, in the form of a recount, or a third-person narrative, from the point of view of a seemingly omnipotent observer? Perhaps it is told from a random onlooker's perspective, and we only see their interpretation of the events. Or maybe the narrator really is that good at remembering the tiniest detail of every person they encounter. Mind you, some characters seem striking enough to leave enough of an impression that you could never forget that subtle birthmark just above his full, shapely lips, surrounded by just a touch of stubble on his strong, chiselled jaw.
But don't take my word for it, I just escaped from a mental asylum. And I'm a compulsive liar.
