Not an individual, but a type

I had never thought about who my favorite narrator is. It's simply not a question one gets asked in everyday life. However, as I thought about some of my favorite narratives, I realized that several of them had a unique narrative circumstance that made them stick out: multiple narrators.

These are often stories within stories, where everyone is fighting over what really happened. This happens a lot when a group of people are trying to tell a story to a single person, such as at a mixed gathering of friends. The 1950 Japanese movie Rashomon gave a name to this effect, due to the movie’s usage of the concept in telling their tale.

In fiction, we may be treated to blatantly unreliable narrators, usually to comedic effect. My favorite example of this is in the show Leverage, specifically the aptly named episode "The Rashomon Job." The episode centers on each member of the team of thieves telling their version of what happened during a heist that happened before they met, which they were apparently all present for. The highlight of the storytelling was the gradual degradation of Sophie Devereaux's British accent, from proper to Cockney to Scottish to nonsense, which prompts an exasperated reaction from Sophie.

Image credit here

It also shows up in the Supernatural episode "Tall Tales," in which brothers Sam and Dean Winchester are fighting and determined to show each other in a bad light to their father figure, Bobby. (Please ignore the vid's thumbnail.)

This isn't a single narrator, but the fact is, I'm a sucker for the Rashomon effect in fiction. I tend to get into media because I love the characters, so why wouldn't I want each of them to have a turn leading the story?

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ENG 6283: Narrative Theory

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