Ras: What Good Is an Unreliable Narrator?

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee.Ta.

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

This is the opening of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita as told by one Humbert Humbert. He’s talking about his 12-year-old beloved “nymphet.” Out of context today, these words are pretty shocking; you can imagine how scandalous they were in 1955. Because four top literary publishers turned the manuscript down, the book was first published by the French publisher Olympia and sold under the counter in the USA. The eminent literary critic Edmund Wilson, a friend of Nabokov’s, was not alone in seeing the book as ”repulsive,” ”unreal” and ”too unpleasant to be funny.” “I like it less than anything of yours I have read,” he wrote Nabokov.

What’s going on here? Was Nabokov a pervert? Did he craft a defense of child molestation in the form of a novel?

Let’s begin with probably the most crucial choice any author faces: point of view. From whose perspective will the story be told? The two most common techniques are first person (an “I” is the teller) or third person (the story is told from inside the mind of a “he” or “she” protagonist).

Many beginning writers start out with the first person, and it is often seen as a not very sophisticated way of telling a story. Yet some of the greatest novels in the language are told in the first person. Think of works as diverse and enduring as Tristram Shandy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Complexity in fiction is good, and the first person offers layer upon layer of potential complexity. Simply by choosing the first-person mode, an author generates a great deal of authority and sympathy for the protagonist. Everything is seen from that character’s point of view, and it’s part of human nature for people to be persuasive at justifying their actions in their own minds. Naturally we as readers feel a pull toward crediting the narrator’s view of reality. Yet literary greatness can bloom in the gap between what the narrator says and believes and what we as readers understand the author wants us to see.

In his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction, the late literary critic Wayne Booth called attention to the power of what he called the unreliable narrator. As one textbook defines it, the term means a speaker or character whose version of a story is “consciously or unconsciously deceiving.” The technique is as old as Chaucer and as up to date as American Psycho, Bridget Jones’s Diary, or The Twilight Saga.

The point for you as a writer is fairly simple. If you choose the first person, the “I” character begins to become interesting only when you understand that I is not you. The teller is some version of yourself, of course, undeniably, but somebody sharper, more dramatic, more complex, more interesting – a persona you’ve created.

The question is not whether the narrator is a truth-teller. Most unreliable narrators are by their own lights telling the truth; it’s just that these narrators offer us a skewed, sometimes wacko version of reality. Consider the climactic moment in Huckleberry Finn when Huck decides to steal his friend Jim out of slavery and thinks he’s committing a terrible crime and sin. When Huck decides, “All right then, I’ll go to hell,” it’s a truly great moment in American literature, but Huck doesn’t feel that way at all.

In Humbert Humbert, a self-described “murderer” with “a fancy prose style,” Nabokov is taking the unreliable narrator to extreme heights, and depths. For most readers Humbert is a seductive protagonist, a fellow of refined European sensibilities, a brilliant wordsmith, and a man with an appealingly ironic stance toward himself. And on a symbolic level his obsession with Lolita can be read as the Old World’s fascination for the youth and freshness of America itself. Still, it would be a serious error to equate Humbert’s take on Lolita with Nabokov’s.

A few years back when a new edition of the novel came out, the British novelist Martin Amis wrote that “in a sense Lolita is too great for its own good. It rushes up on the reader like a recreational drug more powerful than any yet discovered or devised. In common with its narrator, it is both irresistible and unforgivable.”

To write something that’s irresistible and unforgivable - now that’s a worthy ambition for any writer.

(The photo at top is a still from the 1962 Stanley Kubrick movie version of Lolita, with the great James Mason as Humbert Humbert and Shelly Winters as Lolita’s mother.)