Narrator in the Age of Misinformation: In the 21st century, we are constantly bombarded with information; with every tap, we ponder a new topic, and we are learning something about everything while chronically scrolling through social media. In this age, as we become more self-aware than our entire previous lineage, we also become easy prey to manipulation by powerful industries, influences, and politicians. In this environment of informational, a century-old literary device creates resonance — the unreliable narrator.
Who is an Unreliable Narrator?
This literary figure — the unreliable narrator — is actually the storyteller who misleads his/her readers in the story. This narrator cannot be trusted and is constantly manipulating its reader; therefore, it is an unreliable narrator. They try to justify their actions by manipulating the story to either feel less guilty about them or hide their crimes. This literary device is a delightful way of storytelling, as it keeps its readers hooked throughout the whole story.
The term “Unreliable Narrator” was first coined by Wayne C. Booth, a literary critic, in 1961. The term for this literary figure is a new one, though it can be traced back to centuries-old literature. From the maniacal Hamlet from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who pretends to be mad, to the charming, bankrupt Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who beautifully manipulates words to justify his immoral acts, to the paranoid narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” trying desperately to convince his readers of his sanity while describing a murder. This leads its readers to one question: “Who do we trust?”
In the modern adaptation of the unreliable narrator, as in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Chuck Palaniuk’s novel Fight Club, the narrator doesn’t narrate the story to hide his/her crimes and guilt, but he/she generates narratives to engineer reality itself. These narrators are the most powerful ones because they don’t simply lie to their readers but first to themselves. These kinds of narrators first build a reality of their own and believe it. They control the minds of their audience in a way that keeps them questioning “what’s real and what’s not?” even after the story ends.
In Gone Girl, Nick Dunne becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance case of his wife, showcasing a crumbling marriage between Nick and Amy Dunne. Amy crafts a great scheme to manipulate everyone, including the police and the people, into thinking that her husband murdered her and threw her body away. She writes diaries and stages crime scenes in the house and office, creating her own narrative to frame Nick. Her being the unreliable narrator is not a symptom of madness but is a calculated act of narrative control to manipulate the police, fans, press, and public opinion.
Similarly, in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Pakistani man, Changez, delivers the whole story as a monologue to an American Stranger in a café in Lahore. His monologue is highly unreliable because it only showcases his viewpoints, which are derived from his internal emotional conflicts rather than presenting an objective truth.
While the narrator of Fight Club suffers from dissociative identity disorder, he builds an entire plot and philosophy based on his mental condition, which violently responds to the perceived “misinformation” of modern consumer culture, making it a powerful case.
Humans Themselves as the Unreliable Narrators
Humans are their own unreliable narrators. What they feel, they don’t say, and what they say is what they might not feel. Human bias, internal conflicts, and emotions make them unreliable. According to the psychologists, human consciousness can be divided into two: the experiencing self and the narrating self. The emotions and sensations we feel, the happiness, sadness, pain, anxiety, depression, and fear, are experienced by the experiencing self, while the narrating self makes sense of these emotions and sensations by reasoning them. For example, if you experience happiness, the narrating self will eventually tell you why you feel happiness. This narrating self actually makes us humans natural storytellers.
In the age of social media, or, one might just say, in the age of misinformation, humans love to be unreliable narrators. Curating stories which can be true or not, spicing up the narratives whether they lack objectivity, cropping the only aesthetically pleasing side of the photos, and never posting the ugly ones. Influencers and people around us tend to post only about their good days with just-right lighting, backgrounds, and makeup, making everything all perfect. Such continuous bombardment with idealised images may cause individuals to face challenging situations in their personal lives, leading them to feel anxious, depressed, and insecure about their bodies, professions, and other life factors affected by social media.
That’s not where it stops; social media has become a significant news source for the young generation. Yet it equally serves as a source of fake news just as much as a source of authentic news. Such continuous mixing brings us again to the same question, “What is real and what is not?”, creating an environment of scepticism and truth anxiety towards the hot topic. It’s like reading Gone Girl; we all keep wondering whether the seemingly victimised person is really a victim or whether we are all victims of a well-developed falsehood.
When a weaponisation of narrative is mentioned, the term may seem rather abstract, yet its meaning can be best explained with the help of fiction. The weaponisation of narrative is how Amy in Gone Girl manipulates the press, media and her fans according to her narrative. She does not merely lie but rather fabricates a whole new world where she is the victim, and then she leverages the thirst in the media to exploit a sensational story and air it. In the real world of social media, fake accounts, AI video generators, fake AI picture generators, deepfakes, and coordinated disinformation campaigns are employed by politicians, industrialists, and other influential actors to spread misinformation. The aim is to play with the mass media opinion to gain sympathy, to regulate the publication of information, to undermine adversaries, and, in many cases, to cover their own errors or real intentions. It is no longer a story; now it is a strategic weapon that is being used to construct reality itself.
Conclusion Narrator in the Age of Misinformation
The unreliable narrator has long been a source of literary thrill, a puzzle for readers. From the unreliability of Humbert Humbert to the modern-day weaponisation of narrative by Amy in Gone Girl, from the desperate ravings of Poe’s murderer to the paranoid psyche of the narrator of Fight Club, we have fallen into their traps of deception, often questioning ourselves, “who is who and what is what?” These literary pieces reflect the real world, where narrative is the primary currency of power and politics, and where identity is a curated performance.
Whatever we see is not true; whatever we feel is not true. Sometimes reality feels like a box of fabricated lies where our emotions can have biased meanings, the happenings in our surroundings can be fake, and we might fall victim to the misinformation campaigns of the influential people in control, who might exploit us for their own benefits. So the lesson of the unreliable narrator is no longer just how to read the book, but rather it is a survival manual for the digital age. It teaches the discipline of scepticism: to question the source, interrogate the motive, look for the gaps in the story, and be wary of narratives. But the most unsettling lesson is that the unreliability is not always out there; it is within our conscience.