The Ulimate Unreliable Narrator Novel

[BurtWorm]

[GOPisEvil]

1. Lolita

Disturbing, but I kept turning the damned pages.

[BurtWorm]

3. Agree

And I think a lot of readers take Humbert at his word and read it as a twisted kind of love story--which it is, but it's also about a crime.

[felonious thunk]

2. Lord Jim

I never got what the narrator was implying about Jim. Plus he was very smarmy.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Four narrators, all of them unreliable to some extent.

[Paragon]

5. Fight Club

Sue me, I'm a Palahniuk fan. He's my King/Grisham...only fiction I read on a regular basis.

[wtmusic]

6. I know you're a Nabakov fan BW but

I vote for Camus as being unreliable from an existentialist POV--sort of the ultimate flake

[BurtWorm]

7. It's a close call, I agree.

This thread was inspired by someone's claim that Catcher in the Rye is the ultimate unreliable narrator novel in another thread. I read that phrase and instantly Lolita popped into mind. Then L'Etranger. Then I drew a blank. (Does anyone trust what I'm saying?)

Meursault is so unreliable that according to one paper I read about it somewhere, even Camus didn't get him. (I think it was by Roger Shattuck).

[jobycom]

20. That was my claim. Oddly, I don't think of Lolita as

an unreliable narrator, just an uncomfortable narrator. Humbert is aware of what he's doing and saying, and is straightforward. To me, the unreliable narrator is one where the narrator reveals more about himself than he's aware of, or deliberately tries to hide something from the reader. Fight Club and Catcher in the Rye, for instance.

[BurtWorm]

23. That's a good point

But Humbert is unreliable because he wants the reader to think there's nothing wrong with his obsession--or with the way he acts on his obsession, more to the point. I mean how many who ever talk about the book talk about it in terms of statutory rape? His whole book is a self-serving apology, and he's a very seductive apologist.

PS: I may have to reread Catcher in the Rye, but whatever it is HC is trying to hide eventuially gets revealed, doesn't it? I actually liked that book, and I think the reason a lot of people like HC is that he rails against phonies. I can appreciate the sentiment, the utter exasperation he feels when he can see through a mask to the phony behind it. That aspect of him always stands out in my memory. I can't recall what might make someone say he's as big a phony as anyone else.

[soleft]

8. It has to be Sunset Blvd!!!

[BurtWorm]

9. Was that based on a novel?

I definitely don't trust any narrator who winds up dead!

[soleft]

26. Exactly!

[wtmusic]

11. I was an unreliable viewer of Sunset Blvd.

I left after twenty minutes

[BurtWorm]

15. Give it another chance.

Unless you found it morally offensive or something. I wasn't crazy about it when I first saw it. I hated William Holden. But after a few viewings, it's become one of my all-time favorite movies. And I love William Holden.

[AverageJoe]

10. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

n/t

[alonso_quijano]

12. It all goes back to Don Quixote, baby!

Manuscripts in Arabic by the Moor Cide Hamete that (the fictionalized) "Cervantes" cannot read, an unreliable "translator," claims that it's a "true history" when it ain't no such thing; a (real) spurious sequel to Part I that DQ rails on in Part II; plus the whole book is full of people lying to each other just to see how far the madness goes, only to get caught up in it themselves.

[On the Road]

13. "Lolita" is One of My Favorite Novels

After finishing it, I cried inexplicably for about 20 minutes. It's very strange and powerful.

Having said that, I had to vote "Other." "Pale Fire" is another Nabokov novel with a more classicly unreliable narrator. It's sort of a novel, anyway -- actually a long poem ("I was the shadow of the waxwing slain...") copiously footnoted and annotated with comments that have almost nothing to do with the poem itself, but gradually explain what happenned and how it came to be published. Very disorienting and funny -- it took me awhile to grasp what was happening.

I also considered "Fight Club" even before Paragon mentioned it. Another of my faves.

A more obscure novel that I absolutely loved was "The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun" by Sebastien Japrisot, a French filmmaker. It's written more like a popular novel, but the narrator's sanity and reliabilty is constantly called into question by the events of the book. Get it if you ever see it.

[BurtWorm]

14. Pale Fire!!

Excellent alternative choice. Wow! Good one. The whole novel is unreliably presented: the meat of the story is in the footnotes, which usually step aside from a narrative rather than advance it.

16. Gravity's Rainbow

if you can get through it, you begin to discover that much is not as it appears

Don Quixote is a good choice also.

[HuckleB]

17. Motherless Brooklyn

.

[TrogL]

18. I love "unreliable narrator" as a literary device

The narrator in Ron L. Hubbard's "Mission Earth" decology doesn't have a clue and is totally puffed up with self-importance (undeserved).

Some of Vonnegut's narrators are a few bricks short of a load.

The twist in some of Harlan Ellison's stories is that the narrator's full of it.

[BurtWorm]

19. The strangest story I've read using this device is by Shirley Jackson

I believe: "All That's Solid Melts in Air," told by a man who has uncontrollable rage for his mother, but you don't get quite how uncontrolled it is until the end.

[BurtWorm]

29. Actually, this story may have been written by Flannery O'Connor...

...now that I think of it.

[Guaranteed]

21. The Great Gatsby. nt

[RandomKoolzip]

22. A Scanner Darkly By Philip K. Dick....

Or a lot of post-gnosis Dick, like Valis, too....

[markses]

24. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino

Pretty snazzy stuff.

(Translated from the Italian by Eco's translator, William Weaver)

[SPQR]

25. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

by Agatha Christie.

[mitchum]

27. "the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is the ultimate....

unreliable narrator novel and "Disco Bloodbath" By James St James is the ultimate unreliable narrator non-fiction work (or maybe Peggy Noonan's "What I Saw at the Revoltion")

[BurtWorm]

28. Noonan's wasn't fiction? The guy in "A Charge to Keep" was full of

shit too!

PS: You're right about how unreliable a narrator Huck is. :thumbsup: