I love first person books where the narrator is either morally questionable or unreliable in other ways. I recently read the Fight Club book and loved it and am reading American Psycho and it's really interesting seeing not only how they differ from the books but also seeing the view of the world from someone with questionable morals and mental states. Also love Tales from the gas station, which is very different in tone but has an unreliable narrator who doesn't have a full grip on reality. Any suggestions for books that explore the narrators world like this?
by fuckingthrowaway556
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Les bienveillantes, by Jonathan Littell
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Try We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 👀. One of my favorites in that general vein but won’t say any more than that.
Then crossing the boundary into reprehensible (yet affable) you’ve got the classic, Lolita.
The narrator of Yellowface does things that range from morally questionable to downright bad, all while justifying her actions to herself. It’s interesting to be inside the mind of a bad person who thinks they’re doing the right thing.
Lolita
Usually, *Lolita* comes up.
James Woods (*How Fiction Works*) mentions
Unreliably unreliable narration is very rare, actually—about as rare as a genuinely mysterious, truly bottomless character. The nameless narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger is highly unreliable, and finally unknowable (it helps that he is insane); Dostoevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground is the model for Hamsun. Italo Svevo’s Zeno Cosini may be the best example of truly unreliable narration.He imagines that by telling us his life story he is psychoanalyzing himself (he has promised his analyst to do this). But his self-comprehension, waved confidently before our eyes, is as comically perforated as a bullet-holed flag.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works (p. 4). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The Lesser Dead by Christopher Beuhlman
Lolita is a classic unreliable narrative- it’s fascinating to see how Humbert views the world and his victims in such a warped way.
In a similar vein, there’s also My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. It has a somewhat similar plot to Lolita in the sense that it’s about a girl who gets groomed, but it’s told from the perspective of the victim who does not really consider herself a victim.