Unreliable narrators are one of my favorite formal conceits to structure a novel. I mean, I love reading novels, but it’s just so much more fun to read one where you also have to calculate whether or not what you’re being told is the actual truth or just some kind of a con. (And if it is a con, why is the narrator lying to us??)
Oh, the psychological depths one can attempt to plumb with the unreliable narrator, the existential mysteries of being one can begin to contemplate . . . is there any form of narration better suited to the 20th-century novel?
For those of you who are fascinated, I offer two resources and a question:
1. Wayne Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony, one of the best statements on the unreliable narrator that I’ve ever read.
2. Jeremy Davies (who knows a thing of two about unreliable narrators (cough, Fancy, cough) gives a really fascinating interview where he talks about some of his favorite unreliable narrators.
And now, the question: who is your favorite unreliable narrator ever? I know, I know, it’s hard to pick just one. So I won’t—instead, I’ll say that possibly my two favorite are Serenus Zeitblom and Felix Krull.
