Unreliable Narrators
by morgan on Jan.06, 2010, under Naomi Novik
Have you read the Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes? His Victorian detective fantasy featured the most eccentric and unreliable narrator that I can recall. For a reader to solve the mystery before the detective, you would need to identify the narrator telling the story. The narrator played an active role in the story but not in the way that you might expect. The narrator had a playful tone, and every other character in the story was colored and twisted by his odd point-of-view. The book became as much as a game as a novel, and a very good one (both a good game and good novel).
So any world-building seems to be shaped largely by point-of-view. So we can only understand the created world through a narrator’s lens. Can you think of any fantasy novels where the fantasy world looked very distinctive from chapter to chapter, depending on which point-of-view character was on center stage?
Related posts:
- Tongues of Serpents, and House of Leaves First, to fulfill my promise from yesterday — the next volume of the Temeraire series, Tongues of Serpents (set in Australia!), is coming out July 13, and the fabulous cover by Dominic Harman and the excerpt have just gone up on my website: On to Morgan’s question: Can you think...
- Worldbuilding and narrative voice I thought I'd tangent off Patrick's stint by talking about worldbuilding in historical fiction & fantasy as opposed to thrillers, and specifically about narrative voice, which is one of my personal favorite techniques for setting the stage....
October 19th, 2011 on 8:49 am
A lie has no legs.