Liar Liar Pages on Fire

I've been writing about ways any piece of writing can become more literary.  One literary technique some writers use to great effect is the unreliable narrator.  This is where the writer makes clear that the reader can't trust what the narrator says.  The Nownovel linked to in this paragraph points out that this is because "the point of view character is insane, lying, deluded or for any number of other reasons." It often works best with first-person narrators.  Since writing in a literary fashion is about making meaning, much meaning can be made in that gap between what the narrator says and reality. 

Many acclaimed novels have been written with a clear gap between the narrator's perspective and that of the author.  Gone Girl, for instance, won awards for using this technique to good effect.  The reader is forced to be the detective in a murder mystery to figure out what really happened, what the truth is.  As the Shmoop article linked to above says, in Gone Girl, "We (as readers) are positioned between two—or three—intensely unreliable narrators, and when they speak to us directly, we are implicated in their drama, dragged into the fight so it feels like our two main characters are fighting over us, desperately trying to get us to take sides."  Poe's Telltale Heart also monopolized on a narrator that could not be entirely trusted to describe reality as the reader may understand it since the narrator is clearly insane.  

My favorite unreliable narrator yarn I've read recently was Shannon Hale's Ever after High Book 3 in which the narrator, one who strives for an old-school 3rd person omniscient goes insane due to events of the story and has to be replaced by increasingly nutty and unreliable characters, first daughter of the Mad Hatter, who is clearly biased and somewhat silly, then daughter of the Cheshire Cat, who blatantly makes things up because she's bored.  I write my cat's blog with this kind of unreliable narrator, wherein other figures in the narration jump in to correct the narrator's exaggerated and self-aggrandizing descriptions.  

The Nownovel article linked to above also points out a danger in this kind of narrator.  "Readers do not always understand that a narrator is not the final voice of truth and authority. They may even confuse the narrator with the author." Be careful to cue the reader in either gradually or all at once to the fact that the narrator cannot be trusted.

You as an author can choose many techniques to show that gap.  One is to show the truth via other characters or events in the story.  If you show what happens then have the narrator describe it or have your narrator describe the events and another character or characters correct or react to the narrator in a way that cues the reader into the fact that the narrator cannot be trusted.  If a narrator is caught in their embellishments somehow, that's another way.  For instance, if the narrator somehow is forced to correct him/her self, that would show they're not very reliable.  Another way is simply to have the narrator be so over-the-top in his or her own descriptions, especially when it comes to something with which most readers would have experience, the reader would be cued into the fact that they can't take the narration at face value.  Now that you know this kind of narrator exists, try using it in a short piece to practice.  Where may you be able to use this elsewhere?