Unreliable Narrator
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, an unreliable narrator is: “a narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted so that it departs from the true understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author.” An unreliable narrator is normally a first-person narrator that for some reason has a compromised viewpoint. This becomes a problem in stories that have a first-person narrator, Ariell Cacciola notes that “untrustworthy narrators twist and turn throughout literature.” In other words, the narrator is the filter for all events and what the narrator doesn’t know or see cannot be explained to the reader. A narrator is unreliable if he or she is a first person narrator and determines the story’s point of view.
In William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, the book is told from Caleb Williams point of view. Caleb Williams is an unreliable first person narrator. Throughout the first part of the book, Caleb acts as the only narrator and is not concerned with who reported what; “I shall interweave with Mr. Collins’s story various information which I afterwards received from other quarters, that I may give all possible perspicuity to the series of events. To avoid confusion in my narrative, I shall drop the person of Collins, and assume to be myself the historian of our patron.” (Godwin, 9) Williams notes that his intention is to make novel as coherent as possible. In the beginning of chapter 12 in the first volume, Williams says that “I shall endeavor to state the remainder of this narrative in the words of Mr. Collins. The reader has already had occasion to perceive that Mr. Collins was a man of no vulgar order; and his reflections on the subject were uncommonly judicious.” He announces that the rest of volume will be in the words of Mr. Collins. This is an example of Caleb acting as an unreliable narrator because he admits that he did not experience what he is about to say, someone else did.
The term unreliable narrator is related to term narrator. Even though both terms involve someone telling they story they are different because an unreliable narrator has a compromised point of view that distorts the story. Unreliable narrator is also related to the the term Narrative.
References:
- “6 Types of Narration – Infographic.” Now Novel, 28 Sept. 2017, www.nownovel.com/blog/major-narrator-types/.
- Godwin, William. Things as they are, or, The adventures of Caleb Williams. Printed for B. Crosby, 1794.
- Cacciola, Ariell. “What to Read Now: “Untrustworthy Narrators,” by Ariell Cacciola.” World Literature Today, 21 Dec. 2015, www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2016/january/what-read-now-untrustworthy-narrators-ariell-cacciola.
- “Unreliable narrator.” Unreliable narrator – Oxford Reference, 9 July 2015, www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272-e-1188.
