A Filmmaker's Guide to: Unreliable Narrators

In this chapter of ‘the filmmaker’s guide’ we’re actually going to be learning about literature and film together. I understand that many of you are sitting in university during difficult times and finding it increasingly hard to study and I understand that many of you who are not at university or not planning on it are possibly stuck of what to do, need a break or even need to catch up on learning film before you get to the next level. This guide will be brief but will also contain: new vocabulary, concepts and theories, films to watch and we will be exploring something taboo until now in the ‘filmmaker’s guide’ - academia (abyss opens). Each article will explore a different concept of film, philosophy, literature or bibliography/filmography etc. in order to give you something new to learn each time we see each other. You can use some of the words amongst family and friends to sound clever or you can get back to me (email in bio) and tell me how you’re doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmaker’s guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.

Unreliable Narrators

What are they?

Unreliable narrators are a popular aspect of postmodern fiction in which our narrator is often suspected of either lying or being narrow-minded on a situational observation. Take, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald for example, the way in which he idolises Gatsby himself is possibly not the most reliable thing because many of the actions that Gatsby takes against others are irrational and a cause for concern. This makes Nick Carraway an unreliable narrator.

Unreliable narrators have been around for as long as literature has but the idea was only really explored properly in the mid-20th century with it becoming one of the forerunners for thinking about the narrator as an actual person with human faults as well as the storyteller of the narrative.

Books with unreliable narrators include but are not limited to:

1. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
2. Atonement by Ian McEwan
3. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
4. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
5. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
6. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
7. Baudolino by Umberto Eco
8. The Collector by John Fowles
9. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

What about in film?

In film, unreliable narrators are everywhere. Taking over the post-1960s scene with their lack of human empathy, their mental instability and their tunnel-vision perspectives, the unreliable narrator has come to us in ways we would not eve understand since they make themselves out to be the only source of information. What is different about an unreliable narrator in film is that you can see an unfiltered image of what is happening whilst the narrator is telling it to you. You are not physically only seeing it through their eyes because they also serve as a character in their narrative. You are viewing the unfiltered narrative with their commentary atop of it. This makes for a very different experience than reading the text of the unreliable narrator where you have literally no other aspects of information or story to go off apart from the narrator.

Here are some films you can watch to learn about an unreliable narrator in film:

1. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
2. Possessed (1947)
3. Forrest Gump (1994)
4. The Usual Suspects (1995)
5. Fight Club (1999)
6. A Beautiful Mind (2001)
7. 300 (2007)
8. Shutter Island (2010)
9. Barry Lyndon (1975)
10. The Sixth Sense (1999)
11. Memento (2000)
12. Big Fish (2003)
13. Gone Girl (2014)
14. Joker (2019)
15. Lost Highway (1997)

So, let us now cover some further reading you can do on unreliable narrators mostly from primary sources so you can see how the trust between the author and the reader are constructed in order to make the narrator seem as reliable as possible when in reality, they are far from it.

Further Reading:

Barnes, J (2012). The Sense of an Ending. UK: Vintage

Easton Ellis, B (2015). American Psycho. USA : Picador

Jackson, S (2009). We Have Always Lived in the Castle. UK: Penguin Modern Classics.

Lehane, D (2010). Shutter Island. 2nd ed. USA: Bantam

Shriver, L (2010). We Need To Talk About Kevin. USA: Serpent's Tail.