UNRELIABLE NARRATORS....
I'm sure I've mentioned the fact that I live in a log cabin on an acre of lush greenery up in the Dandenong Ranges. The lawn slopes softly, paths meander around well tended garden beds.
We wake to the gentle call of birdsong and a gentle breeze.
Well that's the idea, the concept I aim for. Not the continual battle with weeds and grass (so NOT a lawn) and I WISH our lawn sloped gently. It would make mowing so much easier.
I love the unreliable narrator. Writers ( think Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell Tale Heart) who tell a tale from the POV of a narrator that we, the reader, come to doubt. At the beginning we are taken along for the ride, we believe what we are being told, we have no choice. Then we realise that things are all not what they appear to be.
Agatha Christie did it with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (to shouts of UNFAIR), she then did it again with Endless Night (one of my personal favourites- thanks Mum)
And I must admit one of my all time favourite movies is The Usual Suspects. I love the way that the 'real' story slowly unravels. And that everything we had thought we'd known was not true. Or was it? This is when you begin to wonder if there was any truth in what we had witnessed.
It's a very clever tool for a writer to use. If done well.
I recently read 'The Fates will Find their Way' by Hannah Pittard. An interesting novel for several reasons. The narrator is a 'we' a group of boys that ponder the disappearance of 16 year old Nora. So not only do we have a group narrator, sometimes broken up into individuals but mostly the group, but the narrator is unreliable. Most of the novel is based on...'what if?'
‘But what if Drew Price and Winston Rutherford weren’t lying? What if there really was a Catalina, and what if she really did get in it? What if she didn’t know the man but she’d seen him before, and when he leaned across and opened the passenger-side door , she got in? what if it was that simple?
They drove away together. It was an adventure, perhaps. But the experience that Nora had no doubt hoped would be intriguing turned quickly into something more menacing than mysterious. Almost immediately after she got in, she probably wanted to get out. It’s the stuff of fantasies, not real life. In fantasies, you can get into stranger’s cars. You can have sex with men you don’t know. They’ll love you and pet you and whisper things that high school boys don’t know to whisper. They’ll fall hard for you and do anything you tell them to, including take you home whenever you want….."
And as you read you begin to wonder what is reality and what is the fantasy that the boys have created over the years. A good read and one that leaves you thinking at the end. Pondering on what really happened.
And as a writer, left me wondering...hmmm wonder if I could do something like that....
We wake to the gentle call of birdsong and a gentle breeze.
Well that's the idea, the concept I aim for. Not the continual battle with weeds and grass (so NOT a lawn) and I WISH our lawn sloped gently. It would make mowing so much easier.
I love the unreliable narrator. Writers ( think Edgar Allan Poe - The Tell Tale Heart) who tell a tale from the POV of a narrator that we, the reader, come to doubt. At the beginning we are taken along for the ride, we believe what we are being told, we have no choice. Then we realise that things are all not what they appear to be.
Agatha Christie did it with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (to shouts of UNFAIR), she then did it again with Endless Night (one of my personal favourites- thanks Mum)
And I must admit one of my all time favourite movies is The Usual Suspects. I love the way that the 'real' story slowly unravels. And that everything we had thought we'd known was not true. Or was it? This is when you begin to wonder if there was any truth in what we had witnessed.
It's a very clever tool for a writer to use. If done well.
I recently read 'The Fates will Find their Way' by Hannah Pittard. An interesting novel for several reasons. The narrator is a 'we' a group of boys that ponder the disappearance of 16 year old Nora. So not only do we have a group narrator, sometimes broken up into individuals but mostly the group, but the narrator is unreliable. Most of the novel is based on...'what if?'
‘But what if Drew Price and Winston Rutherford weren’t lying? What if there really was a Catalina, and what if she really did get in it? What if she didn’t know the man but she’d seen him before, and when he leaned across and opened the passenger-side door , she got in? what if it was that simple?
They drove away together. It was an adventure, perhaps. But the experience that Nora had no doubt hoped would be intriguing turned quickly into something more menacing than mysterious. Almost immediately after she got in, she probably wanted to get out. It’s the stuff of fantasies, not real life. In fantasies, you can get into stranger’s cars. You can have sex with men you don’t know. They’ll love you and pet you and whisper things that high school boys don’t know to whisper. They’ll fall hard for you and do anything you tell them to, including take you home whenever you want….."
And as you read you begin to wonder what is reality and what is the fantasy that the boys have created over the years. A good read and one that leaves you thinking at the end. Pondering on what really happened.
And as a writer, left me wondering...hmmm wonder if I could do something like that....
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