This week's worldbuilding advice column sent Haly crawling through the archives to gather up even more information on crafting and identifying unreliable narrators in fiction.
In the case of Memento or A Beautiful Mind, the narrators are both unreliable but due to brain injuries. Neither of them are lying per se, but the result is the same. How would someone write that story in a way that's fair to the reader especially if the MC has no clue anything is wrong?
//We're led into this questioning place of is it aliens, is it this, is it that, and in the end, we find out that it's a brain tumor.//
When the MC has no clue that something is wrong, then that journey of discovery has to be a part of it. In Phenomenon, part of the story is going through all the medical tests and everything. It's not like the doctors are convinced it's aliens or angels. The doctors are convinced that there is a medical cause for everything that is happening, and that search drives our faith in the end of the movie.
So. If you are looking at, say, a character who does not know that they are a werewolf, and they are trying to solve the case of why the neighbor's sheep keep going missing...then so long as this investigation keeps leading to the idea that someone in the area, then someone in the character's household, then inescapably the character himself (whether he wants to believe it or not, he might still look for a stranger who was camping on the farm or something before he actually ACCEPTS the truth) then you're playing fair.
And as long as you're introducing the solution somewhere in the beginning -- in Phenomenon, I want to say he collapses pretty early in the first act and that's what starts the medical journey -- then you're playing fair. (The doctors are the solution, the tumor is the cause.)
I always think of "the sixth sense" when I think of unreliable narrator
The village is also a good example unreliable narrator
Yaaaaaasssss! Back when he still knew how to write a story!!
In the case of Memento or A Beautiful Mind, the narrators are both unreliable but due to brain injuries. Neither of them are lying per se, but the result is the same. How would someone write that story in a way that's fair to the reader especially if the MC has no clue anything is wrong?
Phenomenon, too.
//We're led into this questioning place of is it aliens, is it this, is it that, and in the end, we find out that it's a brain tumor.//
When the MC has no clue that something is wrong, then that journey of discovery has to be a part of it. In Phenomenon, part of the story is going through all the medical tests and everything. It's not like the doctors are convinced it's aliens or angels. The doctors are convinced that there is a medical cause for everything that is happening, and that search drives our faith in the end of the movie.
So. If you are looking at, say, a character who does not know that they are a werewolf, and they are trying to solve the case of why the neighbor's sheep keep going missing...then so long as this investigation keeps leading to the idea that someone in the area, then someone in the character's household, then inescapably the character himself (whether he wants to believe it or not, he might still look for a stranger who was camping on the farm or something before he actually ACCEPTS the truth) then you're playing fair.
And as long as you're introducing the solution somewhere in the beginning -- in Phenomenon, I want to say he collapses pretty early in the first act and that's what starts the medical journey -- then you're playing fair. (The doctors are the solution, the tumor is the cause.)
Make sense?
It does indeed. Thanks!