by Quentin Long ©2007 Quentin Long

   When I was short, I believed Thomas Edison lived in California.
   And not just anywhere in the Golden State; I was convinced that Edison had resided in the San Francisco Bay Area, not far at all from my home town of Los Altos. Practically a neighbor, really. You see, all the books I’d read about Edison made a point of referring to him as ‘the Wizard of Menlo Park’, and any Los Altan with half a brain knows where Menlo Park is: You get on the Bayshore Freeway, drive North about 10 miles, and there you are!
   At that time, it never even occured to me that there might be another city, somewhere else in the US, named ‘Menlo Park’…
   …which brings us neatly to the topic of this essay: Unreliable narrators. Okay, show of hands: How many of you know any human beings who are absolutely never in error about anything? Me, neither. Which makes sense, since we are all of us fallible mortals. We can be wrong about all kinds of things, for all kinds of reasons.
So why shouldn’t a story’s narrator screw up sometimes? They're only human, after all!
   Then again, the narrator is the author’s mouthpiece, the character who feeds all the descriptions and so on to the reader. If the narrator is lying to the reader, what’s the point of reading that story at all? The answer is that ‘unreliable’ is not a synonym for ‘dishonest’. As long as your narrator is only guilty of being wrong, and doesn't actually lie to the reader, you’d be surprised what the reader will let you get away with.
   How can a narrator be wrong without being a liar? Let me count (some of) the ways…

1. Missing information. If your narrator is unaware of Fact X, it’s a good bet that they’re going to be wrong about anything that’s related to Fact X.
2. Misplaced belief. Show me a person who’s got an unjustly high degree of faith in a particular proposition, and I'll show you a person who’s going to be wrong about a lot of things which that proposition touches upon.
3. Psychological quirks. If John Doe has a pathological fear of horses, how likely is it that Doe will be able to tell you the right way to put a saddle on?
4. Overconfidence. “I know I’m right, damnit!” is an attitude highly conducive to getting blindsided by Reality