|Cover of First Edition, 1925|
Creative Commons Licence
One immediately thinks of Nick Carraway, the unreliable narrator of The Great Gatsby, who announces to his audience early in the novel: “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” He then proceeds to cover up for Gatsby, he fails to disclose the facts of Tom Buchanan's affair to his cousin, Daisy and lies by omission to Tom. Fitzgerald wants his reader to share Nick's view that Gatsby was better than "the whole damn bunch put together."
Bantam Classics Edition
Unreliable Narrators are usually presented in the first person, to tell the story of the novel's protagonist, or to relate their own stories to a sympathetic audience. Catherine Earnshaw's story, in Wuthering Heights, is told by two unreliable narrators: Mr Lockwood, a passionless man, and Nelly Dean, who admitted to her dislike of Cathy. While Huck Finn is considered an impaired narrator due to his immaturity, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
|Wiki Creative Commons Licence|
E.W. Kemble 1884
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his or her unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted. (Wikipedia ~ See link above)
Our Challenge is to write a poem from the first person point of view using a narrator whose unreliability becomes clear to the reader through the course of the narrative.
Here are a few suggestions to consider as a starting point:
This challenge offers us a chance to flex our narrative muscles, and also to consider what our intentions are as writers. I also hope that we can have a lot of fun with this idea in the process.