I’ve always loved unreliable narrators – those masters of dissimulation, evasion and misdirection, who weave a story of truths or untruths for the reader to unpick. But in the age of AI, simulations and deep fakes, technology adds another layer of unreliability to our world. What does this mean for our unreliable narrator?
Notorious in film and fiction they range from Nick Carraway’s selective narrative in The Great Gatsby, Shirley Jackson’s knowingly deceptive eighteen-year-old Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, to a husband-and-wife duo of unreliable narrators (Amy and Nick Dunne) in Gone Girl. What sets them apart, however, is their motive (or lack of it); the reason behind their unreliability. In his 1981 book, William Riggan identified four types of unreliable narrator: the ‘picaro’ (the rogue who exaggerates), the ‘madman’ (such as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and Teddy in Shutter Island), the ‘naïf’ (unreliable due to age or inexperience, such as Holden Caulfield), and the ‘clown’ (who uses ambiguity and irony, such as Lolita’s Humbert Humbert). As for the latter type, conscious dissimulation is such an important feature of the clown’s narrative, that it can be categorised as the liar (who deliberately deceives). Unreliable narrators operate on concealment, deception and/or omission. In contemporary fiction, there has been an explosion in the number of thrillers featuring unreliable protagonists. As readers, perhaps what appeals to us, is that we participate in what Riggan calls these narrators’ ‘dissimulative process’. We act as detectives, piecing the ‘truth’ of a story together. The narrative becomes a puzzle for us to solve. Many contemporary thrillers’ ultimate twist hinges on the use of an unreliable narrator. One of the best recent examples is Alex Michaelides’ internationally bestselling debut The Silent Patient with its masterful final twist.
Unreliable narrators can be deliberately deceptive or unintentionally mislead us, but in some instances, it is due to the protagonist grappling to construct their own identity. In recent years, we’ve encountered a fifth type: the amnesiac – a literary device using memory to further complicate the role of the unreliable narrator. So we meet Jason Bourne in Bourne Identity, found floating in the Mediterranean with no memory of who he is – a narrator suffering psychogenic amnesia: he can retain new information, but his autobiographical memory is impacted. While in Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, the protagonist Leonard struggles with anterograde amnesia, preventing him from forming new memories as he fights to track down his wife’s murderer. The amnesiac narrator is set apart from other unreliable narrators – they are unreliable for what they themselves do not know. The amnesiac narrator is not trying to mislead the reader but struggling to piece together their own identity.
In my debut novel, The Glass Woman, scientist Iris awakes in hospital with no memory of who she is. She is told she is suffering from focal retrograde amnesia. She is able to produce new memories, but she is having trouble accessing past ones, especially from the last eight years. The Glass Woman is an amnesiac thriller with an added layer of unreliability, however: Iris must reconstruct her own sense of identity whilst battling a pioneering AI chip implanted in the frontal lobe of her brain. Her very memories are uncertain. She is struggling to work out what to believe of the memories fed to her, and who to trust of those her memories tell her she loves. Everything in her head is called into question. She does not know who or what to trust, so how can the reader know what to believe? When writing about Iris I wanted to ask questions about technology and AI at their most extreme. As the reader decides what to believe, Iris, too, is grappling with what to trust of the information the AI implant feeds to her. The novel is a cautionary tale exploring the impact unchecked technology could have on a character’s perception and their very identity.
Which brings us onto a sixth type of unreliable narrator – the narrator whose perception is distorted by technology. Think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, as we witness Joel and Clementine’s relationship in reverse as he has his memories wiped by Lacuna Inc. AI poses new possibilities for misdirection and mistruths in reality as well as fiction. In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro takes a different approach: with Klara (an Artificial Friend) as his narrator, it is her lapses in human understanding that impacts her reliability. In my novel, The Glass Woman, Iris is human, but combined with an AI neural implant, everything in her head is called into question – she does not know whether her very memories and identity are real, or a story being told to her and fabricated by an advanced AI. A consequence of discovering a narrator’s unreliability, is that it forces us as readers into what Riggan called a ‘confrontation with the slippery nature of truth’. To me, this is especially relevant in a technologically advanced world. Our technological inventions are in danger of impacting our perception and identity as individuals and as a society. Thought and ‘truth’ are in danger of being outsourced to the internet, to AI, to machines. But AI, or machine learning, is not concerned with ‘truth’, but with a rehashing of the information it has been trained on. Today, the unreliable narrator is more important than ever, holding a mirror up to the unreliability of our own world. As technology advances, there are greater possibilities for writers creating unreliable narrators, but it also requires greater feats of the imagination, as our world becomes stranger than fiction.
The Glass Woman by Alice McIlroy
Black Mirror meets Before I Go to Sleep by way of Severance.
If you could delete all the hurt and pain from your life… would you? Even if you weren’t sure what would be left?
Pioneering scientist Iris Henderson awakes in a hospital bed with no memories. She is told that she is the first test-subject for an experimental therapy, placing a piece of AI technology into her brain. She is also told that she volunteered for it. But without her memories, Iris doesn’t know what the therapy is or why she would ever choose it.
Everyone warns her to leave it alone, but Iris doesn’t know who to trust. As she scratches beneath the surface of her seemingly happy marriage and successful career, a catastrophic chain of events is set in motion, and secrets will be revealed that have the capacity to destroy her whole life.
Alice McIlroy’s writing has been longlisted for the Stylist Prize for Feminist Fiction and Grindstone International Novel Prize. Her debut novel, The Glass Woman, will be published on 2nd January 2024 by Datura/Angry Robot Books. It can be pre-ordered here.
She can be found on Twitter @alice_mcilroy and Instagram @alicemcilroy_author.
