The Unreliable Narrator

Agent Obscura has an interesting post today about authors creating a public persona for their blogs. At least I *think* that's what it was about! With Nadia Cornier there are so many tangents it's difficult to tell sometimes:)

I think taking on a personality that's not our own happens when we write, whether we do it consciously or not. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. Every story we tell is filtered through our unique viewpoint. That's why accounts of a battle or even a car accident can differ so widely among witnesses.

In modern romance, the fashion is not to have a narrator in the sense of someone telling the story in the omniscient third person. The story is told in what is known as 'deep third person point of view'. The point of view character in a particular scene filters everything that happens, it's true, but we generally get a true account of what they think and feel about what's happening. We can usually rely on their account of events in the novel. When they color them based on their own unique outlooks, we know that's what they're doing because we know we're inside their heads. The unreliable narrator is someone who seems to be telling the truth but is not. They are concealing things, embellishing, sometimes outright lying to the reader. Sometimes the reader is meant to know this. Other times, the twist at the end comes when the reader realises she has been duped.

The unreliable narrator has been used a lot in literary fiction and mysteries, but not, to my recollection, in romance. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we played with that a little more. One of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects, uses the unreliable narrator to brilliant effect. I won't give away the twist, but it was one of those slap the forehead moments for me at the end. Why didn't I think of that? I love it when that happens. However, I think if it happened in a romance, said romance would be thrown at the nearest wall.