Recently I finished reading The People in the Trees, a terrific, yet haunting work of fiction written by Hanya Yanagihara. The book is essentially the edited memoir of renowned scientist Dr. Norton Perina, who writes his memoir from prison after he is accused and convicted of committing a heinous crime. Norton’s memoir is made available to the reader thanks to his friend and colleague Dr. Ronald Kubodera, who prompts Norton to write the manuscript and acts as editor and narrator, providing helpful footnotes for the reader’s benefit. In his memoir Norton tells the reader of his childhood, his relationship with his twin brother, his research trip to a mysterious island in the Pacific, his discovery of a turtle that can grant immortality, and his eventual undoing. From the beginning, however, the reader is suspicious of Norton and his account of the events that led to him being in prison. The reader is also suspicious of Ronald, who might or might not be filtering and editing the truth that Norton might or might not be telling. Yanagihara has then given the reader not one, but two unreliable narrators, which I must admit at times was more than I could bear. Was Norton being truthful or was he writing a lie? And was Ronald publishing the truth and nothing but the truth, or simply an edited, less implicating version of it? The ending of the novel, which left me chilled to the bone, provides an answer to these questions.
By Hanya Yanagihara
The book left me thinking about unreliable narrators and the role they play in literature. Yanagihara’s characters join a slew of unreliable narrators that litter the fiction genre, including the lascivious Humbert Humbert in Lolita and self-proclaimed liar Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.
By Vladimir Nabokov
By J.D. Salinger
Why is the unreliable narrator so popular in literature? My guess is that unreliable narrators are the closest thing we have in fiction to the human psyche. Think this over for a moments: when you’re telling a story to a friend, you’re telling it from your point of view and, whether you like it or not, your truth might be different from someone else’s truth. Maybe the guy sitting next to you saw things a little bit differently than you, but how could you possibly know that? When you’re telling a story, it’s hard to remain objective. The same thing happens with many unreliable narrators. The unreliable narrator in fiction isn’t necessarily an outright liar. He or she might lie by omission, exaggerate something, give an event less importance than it deserves, and so on. Some unreliable narrators might simply be unhinged (Edgar Allan Poe definitely gave us a lot of those in his short stories). In essence, however, the unreliable narrator is someone who is telling a slanted truth. It’s something we all do, albeit subconsciously. Some readers abhor dealing with unreliable narrators, claiming that they are nothing more than an overused literary technique. I respectfully disagree. The unreliable narrator is a mirror image of the human mind, which is always at work on a subconscious level. Yes, there are unreliable narrators who are being deliberately coy and untruthful, but the best type of unreliable narrator, in my opinion, is the one who doesn’t know he or she is sliding towards unreliability, the one that swears he or she is telling the truth and nothing but the truth, the one who suddenly plants a seed of doubt in the reader with masterfully uttered words, the one that, inevitably, lives inside every single one of us.
Until next time,
Simply Beautanical
