I just finished a book with an unrealiable narrator (The Dinner by Herman Koch) and am now wondering how I am supposed to know what actually happened when I find out a narrator is unreliable. Does anyone have any tips? It’s killing me that I can‘t trust this guy and don’t know which things he’s saying are true and which ones aren’t. Or is there a way to know this definitely?
Another question is how to even know for sure that a narrator is unreliable. I’m generally a very trustful person and wouldn’t usually question a narrator for no reason. In this book it was very clear but I’ve seen other people describe narrators as unreliable that I never would’ve questioned.
by Mrs_Windup-Bird
1 Comment
That’s the whole point of unreliable narration; it makes you question what we read and what we believe, simply because we only have access to one viewpoint. It’s meant to be a critique and unreliable narration is very much postmodernist in that it rejects certainties and embraces irony, satire, unreliability, twists and turns.
I suppose another way of looking at it is what makes other novels so reliable in their narration? The hero in our eyes is bound to be a villain in someone else’s.