The Unreliable and Unpredictable Narrator

One of literature's best-known and most-used devices is the unreliable narrator. The term seems to have been coined in 1961 by critic Wayne C. Booth, if we're to believe Wikipedia (that ultimate midwife of unreliable narrations), but the technique itself is as old as literature.

Think how dreadfully flat and meaningless Fight Club would be were Jack to prove a clearheaded, trustworthy stenographer of personal history. Ditto for Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Nothing complexifies a story like having your reader realize, partway through the story, that objects in the rearview mirror may be less real than they appear.

The narrator doesn't have to be certifiably insane for the technique to work, of course, because selective modification of the truth (let's be honest for a moment) is endemic among the sanest of the sane. Lying is so common, it's hard to get an experimental handle on it. And who lies more than anyone? A storyteller! For a storyteller to embellish a story is not only not unusual, it's expected.

Mark Twain exploits this fact at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when he talks (via the Huck character) about the earlier Adventures of Tom Sawyer: "That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." This statement, made in the guise of full disclosure (honesty), frames the entire Huck narrative as unreliable—a brilliant device.

Was Patrick Bateman insane? Or just
crazy enough to believe he killed people?

The takeaway for fiction authors is obvious: If your narrator is unflaggingly honest, you've created a rather unrealistic super-mortal (and more than likely, a dull story).

But there's another kind of narrator unreliability that can be incredibly useful and entertaining, and that's the unpredictable  narrator—a narrator who's apt to go in unusual directions without warning. One of the things that made Psycho  so jarring for so many viewers, when in came out in 1960, was Hitchcock's decision to kill the film's main character a third of the way into the story, disrupting the unspoken contract between director and movie-watcher (a contract that says the main character normally lives through most or all of a film). Suddenly the viewer was aware that the director could not be counted on to tether the story to this or that familiar handrail; all bets were off.

"All bets are off" is a rather extreme place to leave the viewer or reader, unless you're writing horror or psychological drama. Unpredictability can and often should come in smaller doses. The protagonist might be prone to sudden daredevil acts; or maybe just daydreams. (Lapsing into a dream sequence is a familiar—and some would say, overworked—"unpredictable narrator" ploy.)

Here's an unpredictability writing prompt for you: Have a character begin a turn of dialog by saying to his/her partner "Did you ever [do/think/see/say/wonder][something really odd]?" For example, two friends are driving somewhere. There's a lull in the conversation. Suddenly the driver says to his buddy/sister/GF/BF: "Did you ever want to do something totally random?" The other persons says: "Like what?" "Oh, I don't know, like, paint a watermelon blue and leave it on someone's front porch."

Maybe that's a lame example. The best example of randomness I ever heard (the person who told me this swore it was true) involved some college students in the Sixties—fraternity pledges, allegedly—who got a jackhammer from somewhere, donned construction-worker clothes, set up traffic cones at a random street corner, torn up a section of asphalt, and left.

The point is, whatever random idea your character comes up with, even if he/she doesn't act on it, reveals something about the character. If you want, it can provide a metaphor that characters can return to again and again throughout the story.

Unpredictability opens the door to humor as well. In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Yossarian tells of the hospital patient in full body cast with tubes going in and tubes going out. The tubes going in start from a jar of yellow fluid and the tubes going out lead to another jar, also of yellow fluid. When the top jar runs low and the bottom jar is full, a nurse exchanges the top and bottom jars. This is not only an unpredictable and unexpected occurrence but marks Yossarian as an unreliable narrator, because anybody knows urine would never be administered intravenously to a patient in a hospital. On the other hand, Yossarian has been trying to suggest that everyone around him is insane, and maybe they are. Such an anecdote makes you wonder.

Unpredictability is not only a gateway to humor, it's a good way to get unblocked (if you're writing fiction) when you reach a scene or section of dialog where you're not sure how to begin.

In the comic romance I'm writing, the two lead characters, Tyler Schremp and his new girlfriend Molly Ledbetter, accompanied by their puppets, mini-Schremp and mini-Molly, are out on a date (their first "real" date since their puppets met a week earlier). They've decided to meet at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Clara, CA called Wu Wu. The two stare at each other googly-eyed, holding hands across the table, while the waitress reels off her Spiel. When the waitress leaves, mini-Schremp asks mini-Molly "Did you get all that?" "All what?" "What the waitress just said?" "Um, no, actually. What did she say?"

At this point, Schremp (speaking through his puppet) explains that the waitress said she just finished sacrificing a duck in their honor, in order to make the "duck sauce" sitting in front of them. Molly dips a fried noodle in the sauce, tastes it, whispers something in her puppet's ear. Then her puppet says: "She said it tastes a lot like apricot jam with water."

Mini-Schremp: "Exactly! See, that's the miraculous thing. When prepared properly, according to the five-hundred-year old recipe, the pineal gland of the mallard tastes sweet and fruity, like apricot, with hints of ginger and vinegar..."

Mini-Schremp then goes on to tell how the waitress's name badge says "Aimee" but in fact she's known in Beijing as Dong Sue. She was brought to the U.S. two years ago, after being sold into sexual slavery in Redwood City. But she managed to kill her captors, and now she works for "that big huge guy in the kitchen, right there—the guy with the missing fingertip, see him? His name is Saki Tumi, a.k.a. Wei Wei Fat; he's actually Japanese, a former Yakuza hit man. This is his territory, we're safe here. He opened this restaurant ten years ago, after making a fortune filming snuff movies in Fukushima. Born-again Christian. Nicest guy you'll ever want to meet."

Absurdity, in this case, proves to be a great ice-breaker. The characters go on to have a great time, the reader (I hope) has a great time, the puppets get naughty, a big secret gets revealed, the main character has a realization, and the relationship goes to the next level.

The novel, by the way, is called B.A.T.T.Y., and I hope you'll buy it when it comes out. (I've got to finish writing it first.)

Unpredictable/unreliable narrators are, let's face it, a lot more entertaining than guileless, truth-obsessed court reporters. Have fun with your narrator. Let him or her go a little crazy. It's what the reader wants.

A Scene from B.A.T.T.Y.

Yesterday I showed how I handled the problem of noise description in a scene from a comedic novella (code name B.A.T.T.Y.) I'm working on. I thought today I'd present the entire scene (free book sample!) along with an explanation of what the scene does and why it's constructed the way it is.

I wanted to accomplish a number of goals with this scene. The main character, Tyler Schremp, has been talked into having a quick drink at Joy Joy (a fictional restaurant/bar in Palo Alto) on the way home from work. Schremp has group therapy at seven, so the drink has to be a quickie. Both Schremp and his buddy Matt Dixon are young engineers working for a hot toy-company startup in Silicon Valley (called HoityToyty). They have a love-hate relationship with their jobs. They love creating high-tech toys, but their boss (an insufferable ass) has them working on such idiotic projects as a scent-emitting unicorn doll (Fresh Scent Cornelia). You put Glade scent-packs in the unicorn's ass, and then, assuming the batteries are fully charged, the doll spurts air freshener (in microprocessor-controlled bursts) out its anus all day.

The goals for the scene are:

• Show that Schremp and Dixon are best buds of long standing. Male bonding.
• Show their dissatisfaction with work, their eagerness to go into business for themselves.
• Have them talk about Schremp's main problem, which (at the moment) is how to reconnect with the beautiful and mysterious puppet-toting redhead he met a few nights ago.
• Do all this in a lighthearted way.

The entire scene is a segue from an office scene to a group-therapy scene. It has to cap off a lousy day at the office while paving the way for group therapy. (The redhead will show up at group therapy.) Here's the whole scene:

     The crescendo of cacophony at Joy Joy hadn't yet reached full-on Happy Hour earbleed level, but the din was prodigious -- so much so that Dixon had to go back out the front door to the sidewalk to check his voicemail while Schremp, securing the last empty stools at the bar, fetched two tall glasses of Buttface Amber (one of the featured microbrews-of-the-day) from the red-suspendered, all too jolly bartender-du-jour.
     As Dixon finally shuffled back inside, tucking his iPhone in his pocket, Schremp asked: "Anything important?"
     Dixon, accepting a beer from Schremp: "Hitler called, he wants his youth back. Other than that --"
     Schremp raised his glass, said a "Heil Mary," and took a sip. Dixon did likewise.
     Dixon: "What about you,? Any word from --"
     "Not a peep. Beginning to think I popped the clutch." Schremp licked foam off his upper lip and looked in vain for a coaster on which to see his beer, finding, instead, only a soggy cocktail napkin. "You know, maybe I just --"
     "I wouldn't worry about it," Dixon said, with a dismissive flip of the hand. "It's only been, what, a week?"
     "Yeah. Not even." Schremp was having to speak loudly now, to be heard over the background noise.
     "But you called her, right?"
     Schremp nodded as he drank. "I don't feel right leaving, you know, a hundred messages or something, though. Don't want to come across as a stalker . . ."
     "How many times have you called her?"
     "Twice. Plus one text message."
     "Pffah. Dude. That's not stalking. Take it from someone who knows." Dixon held his glass up and admired the three concentric rings of foam in the empty upper third. "Look, chug lines . . ."
     Schremp sighted across the chug lines and down the crowded bar, taking in the pot-luck assortment of helter-skelter hairdos, the predominantly northern European profiles (punctuated by the occasional soft/rounded Oriental face), checking, meanwhile, for redheads with puppets, drooping parallel e-cigs, some hint of a chocolate-suede Sole Society ankle boot. But alas, no joy, as the fighter jocks say.
     "I mean, sometimes I think maybe I am a bit obsessed with her, in a way," Schremp said, fiddling with his glass. "I keep replaying that night over and over in my mind . . . The flashbacks are on a tape loop sometimes, like when you can't get a song out of your head?"
     Dixon nodded. "Earworm. Very dangerous. One time I got Devo stuck in my head for two days . . ."
     "That happened to me with Bryan Ferry's 'Boys and Girls.'"
     "Don't know that one."
     "Well, do NOT listen to it, my friend. Understand? You'll go insane . . ."
     "Like that movie -- what's it called? -- where there's this videotape, and if you watch it, you'll die seven days later."
     Schremp nodded before making concentric Chug Line No. 7 in his glass. "The Ring. That's exactly it, that's what's happening to me. And it's been almost seven days . . ."
     "Yeah, but you're not going to die just because Marcy didn't call you back."
     "Molly. Not Marcy."
     "What's that? I can't hear you . . ."
     Joy Joy was fast approaching the Fire Marshall's room-capacity limit (or so Schremp supposed), the place packed now with clamorous roisterers intent on pushing the decibel envelope beyond airline baggage-handler recommended maximums. Cocktail glasses (three in a waitress's hands at once) clinked and clacked, cash register slamming shut as someone's stool-leg stuttered across the floor nearby ("What can I getcha?"), burly guffaws competing with soprano laughter, a sudden swoosh of street noise as fresh celebrants burst through the main entry door, wine cork's thoppp! providing a grace-note to a distant woman's rising arpeggio of giggles -- the thrum of a vox humana orchestra tuning up.
     Schremp swirled the remaining two ounces of beer in his glass. He scanned the crowd, eyes finally falling on Dixon. At the first lull in the background noise he said: "We could fix the noise problem, you know."
     "Yeah, we could go outside . . ."
     "No, I mean we could fix it. With technology."
     Dixon was game. "Go on."
     "An array of microphones in that wall over there" -- Schremp motioned with his head -- "and an array of speakers in this wall over here. Right? Invert the signal, drive the anti-noise through the speakers, time it so the noise gets canceled for these people right over here . . ."
     Dixon mused on it, nodding, far-away stare, feigning comprehension. "Interesting idea..."
     "See, if you have enough microphones, you can triangulate the origin of any individual sound in this room . . . or all of the various sounds --"
     Dixon's brows unfurled, an Aha moment slowly washing across his face.
     "-- and likewise, with an array of speakers, you can focus calibrated anti-noise on any location in the room . . ."
     "Barroom active noise suppression. BANS."
     "Exactly."
    Dixon slapped the side of Schremp's shoulder. "Freakin' brilliant. Dude, you're a genius, you know that?"
     The two clinked glasses and then knocked back the rest of their beers.
     Dixon grabbed a half-soaked cocktail napkin from the bar and used it to wipe his mouth. "This," he said, "is exactly the kind of stuff we ought to be working on. Instead of unicorns with April-fresh anal glands."
     Schremp nodded, half-smiling. "Yep. It's just about that time."
     Dixon glanced at his watch. "Group therapy?"
     "No. I mean, yeah, that too. But what I meant was, it's just about time . . . for us to turn the page. You know? Put HoityToyty behind us."
     Dixon smiled. "Ordinarily, the last thing I want to put behind me is a herd of unicorns. But in this case, my man, you're absolutely right. I'm with you. All the way."