Who Can You Trust? Unreliable Narrators (Feat. Lindsay Ellis) | It's Lit! | PBS Digital Studios
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- čas přidán 16. 12. 2018
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Who is the most powerful character in fiction? Villains may doom the world, heroes may save it, but no one has more control over the plot than the narrator - expositing the who, what, where, when and how directly into the reader’s mind. But how can you tell that the person telling you the story is telling you the whole story?
Interested in using this video as a teaching resource? Check it out on PBS LearningMedia: to.pbs.org/3fGGRjU
Written by Annie Matthews and Andrew Matthews
Directed by Andrew Matthews
Animation by Dano Johnson
Produced by Amanda Fox
Executive in Charge (PBS): Adam Dylewski
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I am always frightened by how many people do not realize that Lolita has an unreliable narrator... it is almost like a litmus test.
He's a silver tongued villain. It is a litmus test to see if the reader falls for his fancy speech
I think because most people know Lolita from the movie where the story is portrayed as very much the objective thing that happened people dont realize that the book is told by the villain. Also the differences make it somewhat different of a piece of art.
@@Roiben100 *nod* I think that is where it started, but after the movie influenced public perception, and now people often go into the book with the idea the narrator is reliable and thus read the whole story that way. It isa fascinating and creepy inversion of a trope.
Someone who definately should know better (literature reader and I think graduate as well) called it a frickin love story, and meant it. Yes, the love story of a pedofile for a 12 year old. So romantic. Ugh.
I mean, Lolita has become synonymous with sexy girl who licks a lollypop suggestively while wearing frilly pink dresses. It's all pretty gross.
@@AnnekeOosterink i know. the advertising for the kubrick movie has skewed public perception so much that now pretty much everyone i ask if they've read lolita is like "oh, isn't that that erotica book with, like, the pedophile?", even though nothing could be further from the truth. and you know, on the one hand there are some story elements which lend themselves to be overly sensationalised, and it _was_ first published by the olympia press, but on the other hand, it's a deeply intelligent, delightfully told piece of literature written in the most beautiful english there is, so it's kind of... sad? that this is what people think about lolita.
My favourite unreliable narrator is myself
Me
I don't believe you...
I remember as a kid watching an episode of Dave the Barbarian where the villain kidnapped the narrator and forced him to do his bidding to defeat the hero. Pretty clever for a kids show, in my opinion.
Omg I love that episode ♥️
The movie version of _George of the Jungle_ has a narrator that manipulates the characters, chides them, and orders them around. One of them actually starts to argue with him. It's a great bit that lets the audience in on the fact that the whole thing should not be taken seriously.
An unreliable narrator can make people think critically about what they assume to be true. Some people are happy to do this, and others find this uncomfortable.
I think that most people would find this uncomfortable if they saw straight into the implications of where thinking critically can lead them, maybe a newfound moral burden to action which they can never accomplish in their life times, or something else that's wrong with something they aren't able to change. It's always good to think critically, but I tend to think that people who are very willing to go into it are blessed with not being sensitive enough to see directly into where this knowledge could lead, or are unsually brave and bold.
This actually explains why so many guys miss the point of Fight Club
Lindsay Ellis just keeps getting better...
Lindsay is a national treasure. I'm only subbed because of this series honestly.
I like how in the vampire chronicles one book is from Louis’ perspective and another is from Lestat‘s and you realize THEY REMEMBER THEIR RELATIONSHIP COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY.
I loved that because yeah, different people will recall the same relationship on widely different ways. And with no objective POV both accounts become equally valid.
Great example: Lemony Snicket. He makes us think that the Baudelaire children are actually saying their dialogue in ASoUE, when he literally was not there to hear what happened. He has such a stranglehold on the narrative and the children never have their own autonomy until he cannot physically follow them anymore.
Lemony being an unreliable narrator is kind of why I like the end of the series. We see he ends the books because he just can’t take it any more.
Aaaaahhhhhhhh. *cough*. #SPOILERS
When I got to the end of that series and discovered that the point of them was to say "hey kids - I'm not going to explain any of the dangling plot threads, sometimes in life you just never get to find out stuff" I literally threw the book across the room
Your mileage may vary :-).
How are those books? My sister was obsessed as a kid, but they looked too depressing to me so I stuck with my YA vampire fantasy shabang :P
@@oof-rr5nf They're actually really funny... I thought so anyway. It does have its dark moments, but the characters are clever and quirky and the storytelling really makes you want to cheer on the children.
@@SanaSamaha Thank you 🌻
Such a pleasant host 😍
#blessed
Thats PBS. Lindsay swears
Lindsay Ellis is great! Her long form video essays are insightful. Her history as the Nostalgia Chick movie reviewer is...in the past. This PBS series is a great bite-sized packaging of her intellect.
Such a red lipstick
Lindsay rules, she’s got a lot of other great videos on her own page.
We stan an educated,national treasure, video essay QUEEN
👸🍷💜
This reminds me of the Tracy Chapman song 'Telling Stories' "there is fiction in the space between - the lines on a page; the memory. Write it down but it doesn't mean, you're not just telling stories."
We're all looking at you, Lestat
And Louis. Their story just happens to be a mirror of Aristotle's tragic hero?
@@jacobvardy Yes! It's clear Louis is also a liar (which is extremely disappointing) when he is lecturing Lestat and Lestat begs him to stop. He says he will weep. Louis basically says high time he did because he's never seen his famous tears. Then Lestat calls him out for lying in IWTV about him crying on Louis' shoulder.
+Samantha That's something I liked about the movie version, how they took the idea of Louis literally narrating the story and ran with it. It made me wonder how much of what we were seeing was the truth and how much was Louis's obvious affair with melodrama and self-flagellation. The soundtrack was a partner in this, with its huge sweeping motifs and button-pushing musical stings. A wonderful example of how film can sometimes enhance a story rather than diminish it.
It's not literature but Welcome to Night Vale does really fun things with Cecil's perception of his "entirely normal" town
Hears "Unreliable Narrator"
Me: Is *Mr. Robot* on again?
Another unreliable narrator is Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. He spends so much time criticizing how “phony” everyone around him is, but isn’t aware of his own pessimistic biases and immaturity.
That's not much as a Unreliable Narrator. It's more just a character flaw
This has more to do with his opinions and feelings. It doesn't look like he misrepresents the facts themselves. So he's not an unreliable narrator, but more like someone with very particular opinions about the world around him.
Yea I agree plus his pessimism causes him to describe all the characters really negatively and skews the readers perspective in that way too
Absolutely. It puts me in mind of the saying, "If you meet an asshole in the morning, you've met an asshole; if you meet assholes all day long, _you're the asshole._ LOL
@@silvasilvasilva Yeah but his opinions are regularly demonstrated to be wrong. I haven't studied it in a while so I can't hurl out quotations but Salinger strongly implies that Holden is much more traumatised by the death of his little brother than he lets on.
I really really love this series! It warms my literature nerd heart
Ian McEwan explores this brilliantly in Atonement. As for HP, JK is inconsistent - in the very first chapter the narrator is not only omniscient but addresses the audience directly in the line "one the dull grey tuesday our story starts". I rather hoped the series would close on this note, but she stuck to Harry's pov for the remainder of the story.
that was actually a fairly brilliant decision on her part, in my opinion. we only ever know a little bit more than Harry does for the entire series, so we understand why Harry does the things he does. we even share his biases, so when new information contradicts them, we understand Harry's thought processes even better.
Slaughterhouse Five is my favorite example of this
One of the best yet, I say. The Experiencing Self vs. Narrating Self blew my mind.
Agreed! Lindsay's videos are always educational, but the depth of research her team does takes it to another level.
Great example of Unreliable Narrator: Narrator of Netflix show “You”
You're giving me Sound and Fury flashbacks. So. Much. Stream. Of. Consciousness.
You mean...I might NOT be a brilliant, handsome bad ass?
o____o
Nah!
Lovecraft used the unreliable narrator trope a lot too
On top of that. He was an unreliable narrator. At times simply calling things "unspeakable", "demented" or "unnatural" when the monster he was describing was just child of a mixed-race couple.
@@Carewolf in which story did that happen?
Looool! That misdirection. A+
@@Carewolf Yeah, there was a lot of metaphorical and literal racism in his work unfortunately
Damn you, inner narrator! Always feeding me unhealthy snacks!
Dofus: The Treasures of Kerubim, while not literature, is a wonderful example of this. It's about a retired adventurer telling stories about how he got his amazing magical items to his adoptive grandson Joris. However, about halfway through, he tells a story with some of his old party members around and they frequently correct him on his account. Kind of interesting to start the series trusting his words with an innocent naivety, but even when the cat is out of the bag it becomes fun trying to pick out what is true and what is embellished.
Also a tad surprised Rashomon didn't show up in this vid. Then again, that's the whole point of the story.
Treasures of Kerub is a hidden treasure.
When you mentioned Miles Gloriosus (I've heard Miles pronounced as "Me-lays"), it reminded me of the famous song from A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum: "I, Miles Gloriosus,
/ I, slaughterer of thousands, / I, oppressor of the meek, / Subduer of the weak, / Degrader of the Greek,
/ Destroyer of the Turk, / Must hurry back to work." In that musical, he's not a coward, but he is dimwitted, and he's also a pompous, arrogant, and ruthless military commander who's blissfully unaware with how much he repels people, including his betrothed bride, with his brutality and boorishness. Learning that his original inspiration was a coward makes his character even funnier.
Well everyone in Funny Thing IS pretty much a stock character from Roman tradition. In fact the main plot beats are ripped from a Roman played called Peudolus. And their names are literally translated to "Love" "Hero" "Old Man" - in Psedulos' case I believe it means liar. So Miles being another stock name makes perfect sense.
At what age did you realize that the story of Huckleberry Finn is to help a boy escape slavery?
Now years old.
It's supposed to be today years old....
Love this topic. Slightly disappointed Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd didn't get a shout out... :)
I feel like that would spoil the whole story 🤐🤐
@@hajarmdn4883
Yeah, major spoiler, and it doesn't really do anything special with the concept - everything is reported faithfully except for one crucial omission, which is done deliberately and knowingly, and then explained explicitly at the end.
I guess the idea of unreliability by omission is interesting in itself - and I don't recall it being addressed in the video - but it's not unique to this story - the general case is the "Tomato Surprise" on TV Tropes - where the narrative leaves out something that everyone but the reader knows all along.
@@rmsgrey I haven't read the books in years. So I really should check it out again as the only thing I remember was the twist. I was in middle school when I first read it and the idea seemed revolutionary to me at the time. I'm still fond of the novel.
God I love this channel....PBS is such a boon and benefit to the world of academia...
I feel every youtube video as unreliable narator
Liked before even watching it! Your series is just that great!
I like to see them talk about children books
I don’t blame her for not mentioning Rashomon in a short video to a broad audience. Its an excellent example of this concept since the same story is told by a few witnesses and we can’t know what really happened
absolutely loving this series
It reminded me the last Maggie Fish video about Fight Club
I am so happy to see It's Lit! videos show up on the PBS Digital CZcams. Lindsay Ellis is a great host and this is a really well-done series!
Lindsay’s videos on It’s Lit have improved so much, from engaging but not overwhelming effects to no forced-sounding calls to action: I love it!
These are simply a joy.
Very insightful. Love these videos
I knew you would mention Lolita
The boy in the striped pajamas has an unreliable narrator too. It makes it hard to understand if you don't know anything about the holocaust, which my younger sister found out too late.
Love the emasculating ikea chair
... what ?
@@BJSepuku Those are definately words, strung together into a technically grammatically correct sentence I guess...?
@@BJSepuku Strandmon in Skeftebo yellow
does it come with a strinne green stripe pattern?
@@d.rabbitwhite a year late, but thumbs up for the Fight Club reference ❤
Excellent, thank you very much!
Very nice job! Y'all do such great work. I always look forward, for the next.
The only more obvious example of an unreliable narrator is Bateman in American Psycho. Was pleasantly surprised he didn't show up
I regret to have to confess that when I saw this title, my mind instantly jumped to Robert W. Chambers' story "The Repairer Of Reputations" as the most classic example of a (surprisingly/startlingly) unreliable narrator that I could think of.
An un reliable narrator shows us a story is how someone thinks something happenend and not necessarily how it really happened, which is how our memory works. That's how when we revisit a book, we might find we remember things that were never in the book in th first place... Thanx, PBS, LU Lindsay!!!!
I love this host and hope she goes on to do many more projects. Thank you PBS, these are wonderful.
❤️ this series.
Me too!
I think this might be my favorite episode. I love unreliable narrator stories and Lindsay was very good at explaining their use.
I had to read "I am the Cheese" in middle school, and I was not developmentally prepared for it, I felt robbed and that my time had been wasted. But in retrospect I think i learned a lot from the book and keep thinking back to it. I've since come to really love stories with unreliable narrators, my favorite being the Wheel of Time series, which has about a dozen or more narrators over the length of it, most of them straightforward, but the few very unreliable ones are the most fun, presenting their stories in a way that you can really read between the lines and see how their actions are not remotely as innocent or virtuous or wise as the narrator believes.
Never been so early. Great as always
Lolita was the first book I read that really made me question OTHER narrators in other stories. I was incredibly aware of how vile H.H was yet I was engrossed in the story, actively wanting to know what would happen next and even amused at the situations. Silly Humberg, Humbug, Humbert! I was awestruck by the incredibly skillful writing that I now look at every narrator with scrutiny. Lolita is a test and Nabakov is playing a game with you. It's amazing!
I appreciate that Lindsay’s essay was about literature, but as a teacher, I used How I Met Your Mother as a way to demonstrate the unreliable narrator.
The show has ups and downs, but it’s at its best when it plays up the unreliable narrator. Ted, and the other characters remember events differently often in conflicted ways, or in conflicting timelines, or narrator Ted forgets details, like the date he calls “blah blah”. They use the unreliable narrator for ongoing jokes, like the goat at Teds birthday.
I think my favourite example is in the second last season when a whole episode takes place in the bar with the whole gang and their usual antics, and at the end, an imaginary Barney tells Ted none of is happening, you’ve been sitting at the bar by yourself for hours remembering the good old days before your friends grew up.
It makes you feel sooooooo sad for Ted, it makes him look so lonely. My students saw how powerful the unreliable narrator tool could be, not just in a murder mystery context like may of the examples my English syllabus suggested.
I love unreliable narrators in books. I love going back and questioning everything. It totally indulges my “over-analyse everything” gene. I remember the punch in the gut when Gone Girl switched over the “real” Amy. It wears brilliant.
*Spoiler for "The King in Yellow"*
.
.
.
I recently encountered one. I was reading "The King in Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers and during the first story I felt like I didn't connect with the protagonist (who is also the narrator). He described things so intensely and over the top.
Since I started reading in the tram to my therapy session, I even spoke to my therapist about it and wondered whether the people a 100 years ago just wrote in different style than today and/or whether I was just somewhat limited in my ability to tolerate certain personalities. I also spoke about other works from around the turn of the century, in which I found some characters odd.
However, when I finished the story, it turned out the narrator was very unreliable. That explained a lot. ^ ^
I love these It's Lit videos.
'hand model' is such a great job description.
Lindsay, it's not Nábokov's it's Nabókov's. Love ya!
I always thought the concept of calling Harry Potter an unreliable narrator was interesting because it gives fans a way to bypass some of JK's biases and present a lot of head canons that maybe Harry missed because he's an ignorant kid
like maybe Dumbledore was more obvious about his homosexuality but Harry was too oblivious to notice
it kind of adds some pure enjoyment to a now tainted series
I stopped paying attention after I read book 7 - how is the series tainted? By the critically panned prequels? The stage play? Or have elements since been deemed "problematic"?
"Now tainted"? LOL, you do realize you just revealed your own bias, right?
@@Serai3 ok feel free to sit on your high horse thinking that Nagini actually being an asian woman transformed into an animal all along is a good and beneficial addition to the canon
+paige And why wouldn't it be? Because YOU don't like it? LOL, you're not going to get far if you're that inflexible. There's a lot about the world you don't know, and if you're going to get pissy every time you find out you thought something that was incorrect, you're going to spend a lot of your life in a snit.
To be fair, any time an author takes on creating several novels within a unique universe over years, things can get problematic because its just very hard to keep up with that much information (hence plot holes). Also magic systems are one of the most difficult things to write because it's way too easy to contradict previous set rules. Time traveling complicates things even more, which is why a lot of writers refuse to touch it out fear that they will fall into a paradox. So, ultimately jk Rowling took on some very difficult world building... mistakes were bound to be made. I mean for Christ's sake, it took j.r. Tolkien 20 years to fine tune the mechanics of his fictional world.
Hey, the Curious Incident makes perfect sense, it is allistics who narrate incorrectly. XD
Highly recommend reading 'The People In The Trees' if you're interested in some more complex and unreliable narration
Love this series, glad to see more regular Lindsay in my notifications :)
This whole concept always makes me think of Code Name Verity
Loving this series!
Very good. Thanks.
I love these videos! So entertaining and not pretentious.
I highly recommend Machado de Assis' "Dom Casmurro" for an interesting take on unreliable narrators. It's great literature, and outside of the traditional US-Europe axis for lit canon.
yeah!
Perhaps my favorite unreliable narrators are those from Kazuo Ishiguro's novels. They're not unreliable _just_ because the story demands it (like in Fight Club) or because they're innocent to a violent world around them (like Huckleberry Finn), but instead their 'unreliableness' is in itself another layer of text in Ishiguro's books. Just like what Lindsay says about the narrative self, Ishiguro likes to explore the unreliable nature of memory and the way it is always reconstructed rather than recalled, and I adore that.
My favorite example of unreliable narration is A Series of Unfortunate Events- one not often sung for being unreliable but one which you realize (especially as an adult) when re-reading the series that our narrator is a brokenhearted and perhaps not 100% innocent member of a shadowy organization which KIDNAPS CHILDREN and that he's essentially been so entrenched in this idea of "noble" vs "villanous" his entire life that it changes how he views the world. And by the end even HE is realizing that! He admits he's scewing the story to obstruct things by the end! Even our relationship with the main villain may be skewed by our narrator's past history with him; his villainous traits stretched and his noble ones scrubbed away.
This is such a good series!
I grew up reading a lot of mysteries (some Sherlock Holes, some Hardy Boys, a few others to go along with them), so I've always had something of an appreciation for the Unreliable Narrator. since I typically never knew more than the narrator, I ended up having even more fun reading the stories since I was trying to figure the mystery out along with them!
Garnet talking about Rose Quartz is like, Baby's First Unreliable Narrator
Holly 🐧, I loved it. I always wanted to be a writer and I always feel a little bit drowned and lost regarding how to write, to who, and how to send the message. This video, even though it is not answering any of my questions, at least give me some motivation to look through narration and maybe how to give the world I am buoding to future readers. Thanks a lot!
One of my favourite literary devices.
I love these videos so much!
I love this series!!
great series!
Heyyyy, this video was gr8! Mixed with facts, and humor. I like it. 😎😎
Might be my favorite episode!
Love this serie!
Talking about praxis on a PBS video! Never change, Lindsay!
My narating self tries to make sense of my dreams 2 seconds after I wake up and it usually comes up with some pretty cool stories :)
i love lindsey ellis!! this video is so interesting, i learned a lot thank you!
A example of a book I recently read with an unreliable narrator was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Young Bruno is so naive and innocent that its almost hard to understand his aloofness but it offers the reader a very stark and sad realization when you piece together what he means by "Out With", "the Fury" and all the other things going on.
One of my favorite books is Code Name Verity. The story is all written documents of what a captured WWII spy is telling the Nazis. You never get to see anything outside what she's writing down so you spend most of the book questioning if she is a reliable narrator and what the truth actually is.
Ron Howard in "Arrested Development". A mostly reliable narrator telling a story about unreliable characters.
one of the best examples of an unreliable narrator novel is the art of starving
What a wonderful video!
Robert Cormiear's "After The First Death" springs to mind when it comes to unreliable narrators.
Ellis is such a good host. And everything is so well thought out.
Lindsay is just... so great. I'm so glad she's hitting the big times with *PBS, *baby*!*
In 7th Grade I had a chance to read The Tell-Tale Heart to the class. They appreciated my adding sound-effects for the heartbeat.
I only just realised the movie The Innocents was based on a book - I'll definitely check it out!
Great as always, Lindsay!
The curious Case of the dead dog in the night time is a great example and a very engaging book! Another good example is Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer; it switches between two narrators telling two different stories they could not tell without each other's help. Both are unreliable narrators, and the book comes across as being mostly true when it is 99% fiction.
I love this series~
A Clockwork Orange. Alex make himself to be the leader of his group but he's the youngest and his 'droogs' left him high and dry at the cat lady's place.
this is the best one yet, i want more lindsay ellis
that "experiencing self" vs. "narrating self" thing...I, well, - experience - that often when I lucid dream. The narating self is the one trying to influence the direction of the events in the dream that the experiencing self is...expiriencing, and therefore can look past anything emotional (for instance 'scary' ) that is happening in the dream. This is why I seldom have actual nightmares anymore. I have dreams that non-lucid-dreamers would probably consider nightmares, but since the "narating self" is assumed to be the "real" self, I know that that 'scary' thing is not real and can't hurt me. (I call these 'quasi-nightmares') It can be annoying when my subconcious fights with me for control over the dream though, which happens fairly commonly for me. XD;