The problem with unreliable narrators is that even when they
are telling an important truth, you can’t quite believe them. Unreliable
narrators have become quite fashionable of late. Jan and I were turned on to
the television show Mr. Robot by her
children. They told us we needed to see season one to understand the background
and make sense of the current season two.
We watched the first season utilizing Netflix and now are
working our way through recorded shows of the second season. [To avoid
commercials and their phalanx of unreliable narrators, I watch almost nothing
live.] I won’t give away the plot, but suffice it to say, there is at least one
major character the viewer needs to treat with a salt lick’s worth of
skepticism.
Back a couple of years ago, two “Girl-titled” books included
largely unreliable narrators. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl told the story through the unreliable eyes of both Nick
and Amy Dunne. In Girl on the Train,
Paula Hawkins created the unreliable Rachel and used her narrative for us to
understand or try to understand what happened.
Unreliable narrators aren’t anything new. Humbert in
Nabokov’s Lolita is unreliable. So is
Alex in Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork
Orange. Holden Caulfield tells us up front in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye that “I am the most
terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” I’d be willing to argue that even
that is a lie.
I frankly don’t like unreliable fictional narrators. I feel
as though the author is using a cheap device to trick me. Now that’s just me;
the authors have won prizes and millions of satisfied readers, so I’m clearly
the troglodyte when it comes to using the technique. (Gone Girl has over one million Goodreads ratings of “really like
it” or “it was amazing.”[i])
I worry that we’ve become used to the technique in television
and novels, and when it appears in real life, we just dump it into the bucket
“unreliable narrator” and move on. Consider the two major party candidates for
President of the United States.
As of this writing, PolitiFact has rated 253 Donald Trump
statements[ii].
Only thirty-eight were “True” or “Mostly True,” leaving 215 as half-truths or
worse. How much worse? They labeled fully 53% of his statements as “False” or
“Pants on Fire.” (Pants on Fire statements are both false and make a ridiculous
claim.) As I write this blog on Friday, Trump again uttered his claim that
Clinton’s 2008 campaign started the (Obama) birther controversy. I’d be willing
to bet that even the fictional narrators I labeled as unreliable would score
better than Trump.
Hillary Clinton has her own unreliable narrator issues. Of
the 252 Clinton statements PolitiFact has checked[iii],
127 or slightly more than 50% were “True” or “Mostly True.” That’s better than
three times as many as for Trump. On the negative side, only 13% of Clinton’s
statements were labeled as “False” or “Pants on Fire.” While that’s only a
quarter of Trump’s fabrications, it’s still pretty bad: one of every eight
statements test is untrue. If I had lied that often to my parents my butt would
still be sore from my punishment, and justifiably so. Even with a (relatively)
better record of telling the truth, it's hard to trust her when she can’t even
fess up to having pneumonia.
We citizens of the United States shake our heads and tell
pollsters we dislike both candidates (and Trump only a bit worse than Clinton).
But we tend to take our candidate’s
lies at face value and jump all over the other candidate’s prevarications. It’s
just politics, we say.
The only beneficiary I can see in this whole mess is Congress.
What? Yep, Congressional approval ratings, which had dropped in 2015 to a low
of 11% (that’s only 1 in 9 people approve), have recently increased to 30%[iv].
Compared to the drumbeat of lies from the presidential primaries and race,
Congress is starting to look good?
I still don’t like unreliable narrators. I don’t know what
they are going to do. That may be okay for fiction, but in real life it’s a
problem—and I am not a happy camper.
~ Jim
