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Never Trust a Narrator with a Speaking Part

QUESTION: HOW CAN YOU tell if a lawyer is lying?

Don’t trample each other racing to answer.

We encounter lies in many forms: half-truths, outright falsehoods, self-deception, word parsing, political spin, press conferences, and yes, trial summations. The novel, by definition, is a lie, and many novelists follow Twain’s lead in embracing the role of liar-by-trade. But knowing the novel is untrue isn’t all that helpful; we know that going in. Within the form there are layers of veracity, things that are “true” or not within the demonstrably false world of the made-up story. How’s that headache now?

Here’s one sentence you know is a lie: this story isn’t about me. Of course it is; otherwise, there’d be no need for the disclaimer. The person who says it is not to be trusted. You know what he is, right? Someone telling a story. About someone else. Hardly any connection at all. Nick Carraway says it, but goes further: “I don’t think my psychology matters at all.” Now there’s a guy running from responsibility as fast as he can go. Fortunately, by the time he makes this statement (and it’s still very early), we already know he’s lying. We knew earlier. Much, much earlier. When? The first word of the novel. And what word can possibly tell you all by itself that the narrator is unreliable? A very short, tall, skinny word. Here’s the Law of Narrative Unreliability: Stop believing the narrator when you see the word “I.” Yes, even if it is the first word in the novel. He’s toast. Given the game away.

Wait a minute. Do I mean he’s a bad person, a conscious spreader of falsehood and deceit? Quite possibly. Not necessarily, though. He may simply be deluded. Naïve. Mistaken. Uninformed. Feeling guilty. Not in complete possession of the facts. Or he may be lying through his teeth. In any case, he—or she—is not to be trusted.

Why? Because, in the words of John Lennon, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.” And just how are first-person narrators unreliable? Let us count the ways.

Oftentimes character-narrators simply don’t know what’s going on or can’t fully process what they see. That would be the case with child narrators. The great ones, Huck Finn, Pip, David Copperfield, even Holden Caulfield, tell us more than they understand precisely because they don’t understand. When Huck says the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords are fine, upstanding people upholding a noble code, it’s because that’s what they tell themselves, and him. But they aren’t figures in some noble, medieval, dynastic struggle. They’re cheap backwoods murderers. We can see that, but Huck can’t, which is Twain’s point, really. Huck is Twain’s Candide, the wide-eyed innocent moving through the world that threatens to sully him and drag him down to its level. But we don’t want him destroyed that way. If he were older, sixteen or seventeen, he would understand more of what he sees and be made cynical by that understanding. Pretty soon, he’d be saying, “And then I encountered the next mountebank, charlatan, brute, thief, or crook in a long series.” Then he would be forced to offer criticism or judgments of their conduct. Now seriously, where’s the fun in that? Such a Huck would be a drag. Part of the pleasure readers can take is that we see that these creatures are mountebanks, charlatans, all-around villains, but he does not. He’s just innocent enough, standing on the threshold of adolescence, to miss the full measure of their viciousness. So we get to pass judgment and render the moral verdicts, a job we perform with relish. But most important, Huck has to be innocent for the novel to work. When he decides to tear up the note revealing the runaway slave Jim’s whereabouts, it has to hurt him, and it does.

I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.

It’s the most moral moment in American literature. No other even comes close. But the thing is, dramatically, Huck can’t understand that. The scene only works if he really believes he’s going to hell, that he’s rejecting not merely the law, but the good and upright people he knows and, by extension, the God they’ve foisted on him, a God who would support the enslavement of one person by another. For that to be meaningful, he can’t see through them. If he thinks, even a little, that their sea of righteousness is actually the putrid ethical swamp that it is, then the entire moral force of his decision is lost.

And, of course, if we can’t see that his “damnation” is really his salvation, then woe to us. Happily, we can and he can’t, so everything is cool.

Huck is quite a representative figure of the underage narrator. More often than not, the child narrator’s task is to provide the Martian perspective. Craig Raine has a poem called “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (1979), in which the extraterrestrial visitor attempts to describe such everyday “novelties” as telephones, automobiles, books, and bathrooms—all things he can’t understand because he has no frame of reference for them. There’s no room for Martians, of course, in most novels, so that otherworldly view must be provided by someone closer to home yet still unfamiliar with common aspects. Have you ever noticed, by the way, that children look slightly, well, alien? The child narrator observes but can’t always comprehend and also allows a sort of clear-eyed honesty not always available to the novelist with other narrators.

Even when the narrator has left childhood behind, looking back through his younger eyes affords the novelist this same defamiliarization of the ordinary, adult world. Charles Dickens uses Pip in Great Expectations (1861), for instance, to critique the notion of gentility as broadly understood in Victorian England. The Russian critic Viktor Schlovsky gives us the term “defamiliarization,” by which he means “making strange,” or turning the familiar and ordinary into something strange and wondrous. This magic, he says, is what literature does for us, thereby making us reexamine what we thought we knew. The child Pip can aspire, as he is instructed to do, to values regarding wealth, idleness, smugness, and class consciousness that readers recognize as not merely worthless, but actively evil. Pip cruelly turns his back on his greatest supporter, his brother-in-law Joe Gargery, because Joe’s peasant ways embarrass the upstart young “gentleman.” He accepts Miss Havisham’s imperatives because he can’t see that her values are as decayed as her wedding feast. And he desires the imperious, cruel Estella, whose abuse seems to prove superiority. Naturally, the child can articulate none of this; in fact, his inability to register all that is wrong in his world provides much of the tension in the narrative and much of the satisfaction readers ultimately derive. It’s not a child doing the talking, exactly, but a slightly older edition of him. Still, the narrative strategy is for the slightly older Pip not to reveal what he knows, so we’re limited by his immature self’s ability to process the world.

Okay, so that’s what a juvenile narrator can do for you. But that won’t explain all the grown-ups. What’s their story?

Got a lifetime? The reasons for employing first-person narrators are nearly as numerous as the novels that employ them, but they tend to fall into one of a handful of categories. Here they are.

What’s the common thread of all these narrative types? In each one, the narrator-character tells the story while laboring under a significant handicap: he or she is estranged in some way or other from the truth. All right, if you’re going to get picky, truth is always up for grabs, but in these novels truth is playing hide-and-seek with the narrator, who is generally losing.

Examples? Let’s say your wife has died. Let’s say your best friend has died, too. One of them is the person you admired most in the entire world. And just for chuckles, let’s say they had been having an affair for eleven years, carried on not merely under your very nose but with your express, if blithely unaware, assistance. And for those eleven years you had not a whiff of impropriety. They knew, of course. So did the other wronged spouse. Only you operated in the dark. Because, for various reasons, they conspired to keep you ignorant and, when they might have told, you dissuaded them. Clever fellow. Now you know there’s only one person on Earth who can tell that story and do it justice, and it’s not the other surviving spouse. That’s what Ford Madox Ford decided when he penned his masterpiece, The Good Soldier (1915).

Or maybe you had given your life in service to an unworthy master, sacrificing happiness, love, personal fulfillment, only to find the cause of that sacrifice vilified, and quite rightly. Perhaps you can’t even bear to admit how much you gave up, can’t openly acknowledge that you let the love of your life slip away or even that she was the love of your life. You were so caught up in your role as the perfect butler that you forgot to have feelings, to live, to be human. Then, when everything you might have had was behind you, your master turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer, and even then you couldn’t denounce him, couldn’t detach from him, because he was all the identity you had. Well, you’d just have to tell your own pathetic story, wouldn’t you? Kazuo Ishiguro thought so when he wrote The Remains of the Day (1989). In both of these novels, the drama is in the self-discovery; to view that process from the outside would drain from the story everything that makes them worth reading. And they are very much worth reading.

Or maybe the first-person narrator knows the truth full well. Maybe he (or, again, she, since we don’t want anyone to be left out of the dishonesty sweepstakes) would really rather we didn’t know the truth. Agatha Christie often employs Captain Hastings or some other slightly dim character as a narrator whose failure to perceive detail, or ability to seize upon the wrong detail, can mislead readers and make Hercule Poirot the more brilliant. And in one very celebrated novel whose title I omit for obvious reasons, the narrator just happens to omit the small fact that he is, when the truth is revealed, the murderer. First-person narration, by and large, is the perfect vehicle for offering something less than the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Sometimes, of course, the truth is not only elusive, but painful. Darley, the principal narrator of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, has a lot to sort through. He describes himself as a shattered man. Everything he thought he had going has managed to slip away. His lover, Melissa, to whom he was not very nice, has died of a combination of consumption and emotional neglect (how often they go together in literature). His illicit lover, the Justine who gives her name to the first novel of the series, has vanished, leaving more mysteries than solutions. Worst of all, the Alexandria he presumed to know, a seedy warren of decadence and privilege, has vanished with her. In its place is something alien and hostile, so he retreats to an island with a small child who is Melissa’s but not his, hoping to beat this unformed mass of event and emotion into some shape that will be aesthetically, if not ethically, manageable. Through three of the four novels (he does not feature in the third, Mountolive, the only one of the four told in the third person), he tells what he knew, finds out much that he did not know, and learns that much of what he knew was illusory. So then, he’s looking back on the train wreck of his life, discovering his mistakes, finding out how deluded he has been, and trying to move toward a more solid moral basis for his existence. How could Durrell possibly have anyone but Darley tell that story? The answer, of course, is that he couldn’t. Only Darley can tell the story, at least in its initial incarnation, since its success depends on his particular combination of vanity, lust, and incomprehension.

You know those dressing-room mirrors, not much in evidence in today’s department stores, where three panels stand at angles to one another so the customer can get the full effect of the new ensemble? Multiply those panels be a factor of, oh, half a dozen, and you have the fiction of Louise Erdrich, who has made a substantial career writing about life on and around an Ojibwa reservation in North Dakota. From her first novel, Love Medicine, she has exploited the collision of competing personalities and memories. Her novels are typically composed of more or less independent short stories that link into larger narratives, and those short stories allow her to vary the narrative viewpoint within a single novel. In that first novel, for instance, we have third-person narration that is sympathetic to June Morrisey Kashpaw, Albertine Johnson, Gordie Kashpaw, Bev Lamartine, and Henry Lamartine Jr., as well as first-person narrations by Albertine, Nector Kashpaw, Marie Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine, Lyman Lamartine, and Lipsha Morrisey. Needless to say, these various tellings rarely agree on motivations, perceptions, or even the main facts of their tangled lives. Jealousy, resentment, self-deception, misinformation, superstition, and inspired insight, sometimes with supernatural intervention, predominate. This is a novel about identity on so many levels, well beyond the chief question of Lipsha’s parentage, that it’s hardly surprising to find so many aspects of identity involved in the narrative strategy itself. All of the character-narrators struggle with questions of who they are both personally and within the larger tribal structure, what their purpose is, what they need and what they merely want. Of course the stories they tell are biased, selfish, short-sighted, envious, generous, needy, wise, confused, outrageous, and amazing.

This may sound strange, but first-person narrative is just the ticket for dealing with the possibly insane. Sometimes the character doing the talking doesn’t know what’s really going on, and moreover doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. Sometimes you just can’t tell about reality. That’s the case in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in which we’re never entirely sure what reality is, except that it’s not what the narrator, Charles Kinbote, claims it to be. The only “facts” of which we can be reasonably certain in the novel are the 999-line poem that shares its title with the book and the murder of its author, John Shade. Kinbote, the self-anointed editor and commentator of the poem, provides the bulk of the novel’s narrative in the form of a foreword, a commentary, and an index. All well and good, except that the critical “apparatus” has nothing to do with either the poem or its creator. Kinbote either is or believes himself to be the deposed king—Charles Xavier Vseslav, Charles II, or Charles the Beloved—of a small northern European country, Zembla, who is being hunted down by the assassin Gradus. And even though Shade’s poem contains no mention of Zembla, Kinbote, Charles the Beloved, or Gradus, nearly all of Kinbote’s commentaries and glosses invent connections to his story. He believes, for instance, that Shade’s killer, Jack Grey, is Gradus and shot Shade while intending to assassinate Kinbote. This despite the fact that Grey is an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane, sentenced there by Judge Goldsmith, whose house Kinbote rents and who physically resembles the victim. Small details such as these cannot impede a mind such as Kinbote’s, however, and he takes it all in his demented stride. Confused yet? Well you might be. The novel never resolves its mysteries, so that Kinbote may be correct, as unlikely as that seems; insane and inventing the entire tale; an alter ego of a difficult Russian colleague of Shade’s, Professor V. Botkin; or a literary device made up by Shade, who has faked his own death and contrived the narrative surrounding his poem as a cover. This last theory was developed by readers and critics over a number of years following the book’s publication. The point of the first-person narration in this case is that the free-floating “I” eliminates the possibility of certainty or objectivity. Even if Kinbote is representing things accurately, his insistence on himself as the center of the universe displays a certain derangement; megalomania always makes us nervous.

And sometimes you can tell. Maybe. Eventually. In Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, a bad man meets a bad fate and doesn’t know it. The unnamed narrator, a devotee of a deranged scientist-philosopher named de Selby, has participated in a murder and robbery. When he goes to retrieve the money, at the behest of his accomplice, something goes awry and he finds himself in a surreal parallel universe that looks like Ireland but seems to have a logic and natural laws of its own. The policemen he encounters (and he encounters almost no one but policemen) promulgate crackpot theories of existence, physics, and bicycles, and they are almost never of any help with his particular problem. Indeed, he seems to be talking at cross-purposes with the inhabitants of this familiar-yet-strange world. Only when, near the end of the novel, he visits his old accomplice, John Divney, now well set up in life, does the truth become clear. Divney, shouting that the narrator must be dead because the black box contained not the loot but a bomb, drops dead of a heart attack and then joins the narrator on his walk through what, despite the absence of brimstone, is clearly hell. Since the narrator has no memory of what has gone before, however, he is clearly doomed to repeat the experience endlessly. For reasons logical and theological, of course, the narrator does not realize where he is. He no longer even knows his name, so what are the chances he can make sense of his new home?

Okay, then: if you want to deal with the slippery business of reality, truth, perception, and delusion, let a character tell your story. That would seem to describe every novel in the world, wouldn’t it? But I think not. They are enough, however, to give you the general idea about character-narrators and the mischief they can create. And what do all these have in common? In every case, the innate drama of the situation would be compromised by an objective view.

Oh, right, the lawyer. Well, were his lips moving?