Reliably Unreliable Narration

I love contemplating narration, the way soccer fans love dissecting a breathtaking goal and the crisp passes that led to it. In what voice does the story unravel? Or does the story unravel the voice? Does the narrator emerge more whole at the end of the telling? Or are they more floundering and diminished than when they began? Take the fourth paragraph of Claire Messud’s brilliant novella, The Hunters.

But really, I took the flat because it pleased me. That would be the honest answer, if I catapult myself back to the late-May afternoon of my visit with the estate agent – Sheila, her name was: Sheila Cooke. Whatever happened after that changed my feelings about the place— and a great deal happened, although in a way nothing did—I cannot pretend that I was diddled into taking it under false pretenses. It somehow spoke to me. There is no need to go into the why of it, but I was sad at that time, and very much on my own, and the apartment had the feeling of a place where people had been happy.

What I admire about this paragraph is how halting it is. Two things are happening: the narrator is drawing us into the story, but the second, less obvious activity, yet equally necessary, is this: the narrator is convincing themselves to tell the story. Like a nervous friend describing a shameful event over coffee, biting their lower lip and looking away, thinking of the best way to begin, Messud’s narrator at once gives us unnecessarily specific details (“Sheila, her name was: Sheila Cooke”) as well as maddeningly abstract ones (“a great deal happened, although in a way nothing did,”) as she gathers courage to say what went down. The effect of such bumbling is that we feel we are being told the truth, since only the truth, as we know from experience, is so painfully hard to tell. Indeed, two pages later, the narrator implores, “You will have to trust me on this. Because I later… came to be obsessed with the irresolvable question of whether my gut feeling, as I call it, had been some sort of premonition of a truly unforeseeable disaster, or whether it had, in some quiet, seeping way, been the very cause of that disaster.”

This quote reveals another aspect of narration that Messud has mastered in this novella and to even greater effect in her most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs: an admission by the narrator that their narration may very well be unreliable. Not in the sly, Lolita-style of unreliable narration, but in the manner that we all intimately recognize in ourselves: because it is hard to remember the past. Because it is difficult to trust your inner version of events, or “gut feeling,” as Messud’s narrator puts it. Because we are terrified that we are lying to ourselves, and need a trusted listener to weigh in. In other words, a reader.

Part of the appeal of first-person narration is its urgency. Despite the long-windedness of Messud’s narrative style, the language throbs with the need to confess, to analyze, to understand, and, possibly, to move on. Or not.

It is sometimes said that fiction writers tell the same story over and over in different books. But what counts is that each narrator they assign to volunteer that story has the overwhelming need to tell it themselves. In order for a narrator to tell a story convincingly, they must be haunted by it, hoping that the story’s grip will loosen in the telling of it, and sink its claws– if only for the length of the book — into the reader instead.