Unreliable Third

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Write a fragment story from the POV of an unreliable narrator— third-person limited (or attached) narration. 600 words. 

This is a deliberate misuse of the more objective third-person narration. What makes a writer choose first person over third person anyway? Usually, an unreliable or naïve narration is spoken in the first-person of an untrustworthy narrator. What happens when you give us a slightly detached, yet still unreliable narration? We will hear the thoughts of this character and see what this character tells us to see.  Sindra smelled smoke, so she pulled the fire alarm. What if we find out later that Sindra had not smelled any smoke?

There is a famous early scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright – A story told by the main male character, who has hitched a ride out of London with the female lead. The two are strangers, but she senses he’s a good man on the run. He tells her the story of what he got caught up in and because she sympathizes with him – and she’s attracted to him—She believes him. The viewers of the film also believe the story, because Hitchcock lets us see this man’s story according to his telling in a visual flashback. The movie was controversial at the time: The man ends up being proved the murderer, not an innocent scapegoat, and audiences were unhappy they’d been duped by the early, visual lie they had seen rather than simply heard (if we’d only heard his version of this story, critics at the time contended, audiences – and the critics themselves—might not have felt so manipulated).

This exercise is going to be alarming and very difficult to pull off. You will irritate your readers, who do not want to be lied to like this, even by a fictional character. An unreliable first-person narration, once we get a little used to it, allows us to see around the edges of the unreliability. What truth of the situation we can gather from what the narrator is not telling us feels all the more plausible. In a third-person unreliable narration, your reader is going to believe a good deal more of the lies, as the film critics of Stage Fright did. See if you can present a deceptive character’s perceptions as what she believes or what she wants to believe, but which also have plausible alternative realities. A schizophrenic worldview is essentially unreliable, for example, if seen from an outsider’s vantage, but from inside is perfectly acceptable and real. But who can see inside a psychotic’s mind? Does this exercise try to get you to create a story that makes the reader ‘hear’ a false story or ‘shows’ the reader a false story? Both. As the writer you’ll have to both believe the lie and show it to be a lie – The trick of all good fiction, in the end.