The Too Unreliable Narrator (was: What really happene...

[Marion Ros]

No: HPFGUIDX 155905

Nikkalmati  (having trouble getting her mind around this concept):
>>I guess that the Fennir PT situation is a potential clear-cut 
non-description. If Harry did the PT, he knows it and we don't. No non-description cheat.
If Harry did not do the PT, he does not know who did it and we don't either. 
If the PT turns out to be important in Book 7, we both have been fooled? 
Is this right?<<

Marion:
Did you ever read the mystery novels of Agatha Christie?
She used the Unreliable Narrator quite often. The UN was what was *fun* about those whodunnits. You'd had, for instance, a murder in a closed environment and seven suspects, all with motive and alibis and several were lying. Some were lying to protect someone else, one of them was lying because he or she was the murderer.
The narrator cannot outright lie, that *would* be cheating, nor can the narrator straight out tell you the truth, then there would be no story. The narrator *can*, however, omit, evade, subtly present things in such a way that the reader is completely bamboozled. Agatha pulled her best and biggest Unreliable Narrator trick in her most famous book, 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'.
For those who've never read it and still want to I'm going to insert some spoiler space.


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In the 'Murder of Roger Ackroyd' the narrator is one of the characters; a neighbour of the detective Hercule Poirot who befriends him and helps him in his investigation of the murder on Ackroyd. This narration in diary form is nothing new, but in this book the narrator confessed in the last chapter to be the murderer himself. And nowhere in the narration does he outright lie.
A part of Christie's readers were outraged. It was unfair, they cried. It was cheating, they ranted. They completely missed the point.
People read mystery novels the way they watch conjurers and magicians. The magician that shows that he didn't really put the signed folded up banknote into his left fist (which then 'magically disappeared) but with some slight-of-hand hid it in his cupped right hand doesn't get the applaus, but the magician who does this and then shows that the banknote which he so-called kept hidden in his right hand is actually a blanc note and the signed banknote turns out to be in the coatpocket of someone in the audience, *that* one gets the applaus. Because we know that the so-called 'clumsy hiding' was actually a very clever way of diverting our attention.
The Unreliable Narrator is the literary form of the stage magician's slight-of-hand-in-full-view. If it is done well, the reader will be delighted for being played the fool, just like the audience of the magician. He or she will think, "I could have known that, it was right in front of me in the text, if my attention hadn't been so cleverly diverted."

On a related note (although it has nothing to do with HP), I can really recommend the novel 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt.
It starts right out with a murder. We know who committed the murder and the narrator is one of them. During the book the narrator (called Richard) tells us why the murder was committed and its aftermath. The Unreliable Narrator plays a part in this too, not because Richard lies in any way or tries to hide anything, but because Richard loves his friends, the murderers, in such a way that he cannot portray them as anything but wonderfull, erudite, excentric and special. They stick out of their environment of pillpopping partying collegestudents in such a way that the reader cannot help fall under their spell, as indeed did the narrator. During the book you start to agree with them. Yes, you think, Bunny really had to die. If you had been there, part of the group like Richard, you'd have helped as well.
And then it all fall apart and you, like the narrator, find out that the friends aren't so glorious as you'd imagined them to be and the they, and you (if only in spirit), have Murdered One Of Your Friends! Yes, he was an irritating person, but the group coldly plotted to kill him and there is *no* excuse for that.
And yet you cannot help but love these characters because, murderers though they may be, flawed as they might be, they *were* special.

I cannot help but thinking that JKR is pulling a same stunt on us.
The books handle such concepts as racism and prejudice, and I think we'll see that in book 7, in order to become the hero he wants to be, Harry must face his *own* prejudices and not just him, the *readers* who have followed Harry on his journey will be forced to adjust their views as well. The Unreliable Narrator is just the device to show us how easy it is to think in terms of black and white and how easy it is to be mistaken about those colours.

Nothing unfair about that.

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