Recently I watched a suspense mystery show in which the entire premise rested on the unreliability of the narrator. After reaching the conclusion, I was frustrated at the apparent laziness of the plot which attempted to satirize the genre with heavy handed use of this trope but ultimately felt contrived and unrewarding. I left the experience with a light resentment of the time invested but didn’t give it further thought until I encountered a much more sincere and deft application of the unreliable narrator concept.
This contrasting story gently introduced suspicion of the narrator’s reliability incrementally compounding this suspicion until I wasn’t sure where objective reality actually started. It forced me to revisit the trope with more sincere consideration given that the narrator of the first story seemed so obviously suspect right away had led me to quickly dismiss it. It gave rise to the notion that as we observe and interact with other individuals in our real life, some people strike us as being detached from the real world while others feel remarkably grounded.
I realize that I judge other people’s reliability based on how congruent they are with my own understanding of the world. If we each are internally narrating our own story, as we interact with other individuals, our narrators reconcile their scripts. In finding stories markedly different than our own, it is instinctual to dismiss this challenge to our own story, to declare that foreign narrator as unreliable and perhaps even malicious.
The lesson I take away from this mental journey is to observe when I have the impulse to dismiss someone else as unreliable and to redirect this impulse instead to inquire further. If we only ever consume stories which closely resemble our own, we form an echo chamber which simply reinforces our perception of reality. The reality which is an abstract fiction, an illusion constructed in our minds based on infinite variables in order to substantiate our existence. In conceding that our reality is a constantly fluid fiction, we can see that we are the unreliable narrator and it would serve us well to not place absolute trust in our mental penmanship.
