It's because of reading so many mystery books that I've always felt as though there's a kind of contract between authors and readers. It's an agreement that the author promises to leave enough clues that you can figure out the murderer and the reader promises to not skip to the last page.
I've always loved solving the mystery along with the sleuth character in the story. Sometimes I'm wrong, more often I'm right, but I love being given the clues needed to put the case together.
To me, unreliable narrators take that away from the reader. So often, there's not even little snippets of clues left. Anything that could give away the 'big reveal' (and these type of books always have a 'big reveal') is just excised.
I actually also see this as a lazy choice on the author's part. I imagine it would be easier to create a 'big reveal' if you don't have to leave clues for it before hand - both because readers probably won't put it together and loose interest and because the author doesn't have to make use of foreshadowing.
Most of the books I've read with unreliable narrators it seems like a ploy by the author. Now, I do know about some books where the narrator is possibly insane so is unreliable - but the closest I have come to reading a book like that is one where the narrator isn't sure if she's going crazy or is being gaslighted.
It was the latter, as I suspected all along, but it was a rather nice use of unreliable narrator because we still knew everything the narrator did - it's just that the narrator nor the reader is sure if it's real or not.
So, what is your thoughts on unreliable narrators? I'd love to know, even if you totally disagree with me, as I know this is a rather popular trope.
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Veronika · 478 weeks ago
Wonderful post, Amy! :)
My recent post Cecelia Ahern - The Book of Tomorrow
AmyAelleah 80p · 477 weeks ago
Yeah, I know a LOT of people love this in their books - which is why I was kind of excited to hear other's thoughts about this. I do think I've had some bad experiences with this. I can think of three books I've read fairly recently that did this, and I really think that two of them did a poor job of really using this. It felt like the author wasn't even sure what they wanted to do with the character, so it was just thrown in. (Like you mentioned. I had no idea that the narrators were unreliable - so when I discovered they were, it really felt like a slap to the face.)
The other one was done a lot better (it was the one I mentioned in my post where we weren't sure if the main character was crazy or not) - and I could totally see how some people would like it, but it just wasn't for me.