Tag: Somnambulist
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?
