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"I know it's crazy but..."

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Who is my favorite narrator? Well, to be honest, I’ve always been partial to blatantly unreliable narrators. Chief in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest comes to mind. So does Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I think I enjoy the unreliability of narrators because it’s a reminder that we all are pretty unreliable if we were to tell our story. I mean, we can’t know everything and yet we all have opinions about something. We’ve only got one set of eyes per person (unless you’re a mutant, then you’re excused from this conversation, sorry), and we tend to see the world through those eyes alone. As much as we gain empathy throughout our lives by reading the stories of other characters fictional and non, there is still a limit to what we can know about the internal processes of another person. Therefore, we all kinda suck (on a scale, granted) at reliably telling a story.

            So maybe that’s why it’s refreshing to read the story of McMurphy taking over the mental hospital from Chief’s eyes. We know he’s paranoid, and we know he thinks the world is made of machines controlled by Nurse Ratched, but we can’t help by empathize with him. The Big Nurse is controlling, and he does seem to have the right idea by keeping his mouth closed. That’s why the big plan at the end of the book works so well, after all. And really, we’re all a little crazy so reading his perspective feels both out of control and perfectly sensible all at once. The only difference between us and Chief is that our metaphors for the things we fear in our lives are his actual hallucinations. That’s all.

            Same thing with Holden. We know he’s an angsty teenager who’s wandering the streets and looking for something despite not knowing what that something is, but the way he tells his story (which is plotless, by the way) gives us a brand new angle into the thoughts of a teenager who has no idea what he’s doing. Although there are moments in the book when we want to shake our heads at his immature thought processes, we also can’t deny that many of them passed through our own brains at his age.

            I guess what I’m trying to say is that unreliable narrators sometimes have the ability to show us little glimpses of truths about ourselves that we haven’t addressed or maybe don’t want to. Maybe that’s why we hide them under narrators we don’t fully trust to tell the story with complete accuracy. It’s easier to write off those hard truths if we don’t put full trust in the storyteller, right? But don’t take it from me. God only knows if I’ve demonstrated why I like unreliable narrators correctly or not.


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