The Unreliable narrator in Carver's "Why, Honey" and "What Do You Do in San Francisco"

In literature, the unreliable narrator is a narrating character or a storyteller whose narration is not trustworthy because of inaccurate, misleading or questionable kind of information he/she provides the readers with. In 1961, Wayne C Booth first used the term “unreliable narrator” in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. He distinguished between the reliable and the unreliable narrator: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he doesn’t” (158-159). According to Booth, the reliable narrator is that person whose speech conforms to the general norms and values of a storyteller while the unreliable narrator, who provides a biased narrative perspective, violates these norms and values. Unreliable narrators would speak either with bias or disinterest, or even lie in an attempt to hide the truth. Sometimes, the narrators are unintentionally unreliable when they lack objectivity or be not fully aware of the circumstances around them. Other times, the narrators are intentionally unreliable when they intend to hide the truth by providing the readers with inaccurate or misleading information.

          Usually the unreliability is evident in the first-person narrator because the narrator is telling the story from his/her own side. It is hard for one person to know all the facts of a story. That is why many first-person narrators are considered unreliable. But not all the first-person narrators are unreliable. In normal cases, the first-person narrator is trying to provide the reader with the most accurate version of the events while the unreliable narrator provides a distorted view of events. Since, in the latter case, the narrator is considered an unreliable source of information, the reader is asked to reveal the reality behind the narrator’s misleading words. So, the unreliable narrator demands the reader to be fully aware, to rethink, reconsider and to rely on his/her own experiences in order to discover the hidden reality.

          The purpose of such narrators is to create indeterminacy and to encourage the reader to offer his/her own interpretations of events. Writers also tend to use such narrators in order to gain sympathy for their characters as Booth puts it: “If an author wants intense sympathy for characters who do not have strong virtues to recommend them, then the psychic vividness of prolonged and deep inside views will help him. If an author wants to earn the reader’s confusion, the unreliable narration may help him”(378).For Booth, since the narrator is telling the story from his own perspective, readers somehow are affected by the narrator’s past experiences and interpretations of events, and as a result they sympathize with the him/her.

         Ansgar Nünning, a cognitive narratologist, has stated a list of textual signals that characterizes unreliable narrators. His list can be summarized in the following points: usually the unreliable narrator contradicts himself/herself. The unreliable narrator’s description of himself/herself differs from that given by any other character within the story. Usually the unreliable narrator offers a self-referential talking about his/her beliefs and values. The unreliable narrator usually directs his speech to the readers in an attempt to gain their sympathy. In many cases the narrator admits his/her lack of reliability by criticizing his/her bad memory or referring to his lack of experience and limitations. In other cases, the narrator confesses his/her prejudice towards certain issues or ideas; this prejudice is what makes such narrator unreliable. Syntactic signals are often used such as repetition, exclamations, omissions in order to emphasize the narrator’s highly emotionally involvement; this high level of emotional involvement is what makes the narrator unreliable or untrustworthy (Olson, 97-98).