I’m not a fan of unreliable narrators. I feel like they have a tendency to make me feel like I’m not in control of things. In this case, I feel like I’m in control. I’m the driver, I’m the master of the vehicle, and I’m the one who decides when to give the gas pedal a rest.
The best way to make this stuff work for you is to practice. Try to keep your actions and emotions out of your narration.
When you’re driving, we tend to use a lot of “do as I say, not as I do” as a rule. This can be great for those of us who can really tell the difference between what someone is saying and what they are doing. But at the same time, it just takes away the mystery from a story.
It is true that a narrator can have a very good story if their actions are very clear. And when they are not, it can be very hard to put into words. Many people just don’t have the language to describe what they’re feeling or seeing. If they say, “I saw a white horse.” it may imply that they saw a white horse.
My brother is that type of writer. He is the kind of person who will write a very vivid description of an event, but if you ask him what he meant by it, he will say something like, He saw a white horse running toward his house and he was trying to chase it away so he could catch it. When he got home he found a severed head in his lawn.
When we see a white horse we are not sure what it means. We are not even sure what the head means. When we say a white horse, we are referring to another specific white horse that has been shown to us in pictures or videos, but which we are still not entirely sure about. When we say a white horse, we are not sure what is really going on. This is partly a function of language, but its also a function of the brain.
As it turns out, there are two kinds of white horses. The first, the one in the image, is a good reliable narrator. One that tells us what’s going on. That’s a good thing. The second type of white horse, the one in the picture, is a bad unreliable narrator. Not good at telling the story. Not reliable.
The problem with unreliable narrators is that they dont tell us the whole story. They don’t say, “I’m sitting here watching this girl die, I’m going to be the last one to die.” They say, “Oh, I guess she’s gonna die anyway.” Or, “I dunno, maybe she’s going to just get bored.” They don’t say, “I’m going to be the last one to die, but I’m going to be the one to make it.
In most stories, there is a main character who narrates. They go on their own story-telling journey through the story. In unreliable narrators, there is no real story to be told. No story that the narrator is going to tell you. They just make up whatever story they want to tell you. You’re not going to be able to figure out what they are telling you because you don’t know what their story is.
In the new trailer, the story seems to be about a guy named Matt who is on the receiving end of a mysterious message. Thats not the kind of reliable narrator that you normally see, but it is an unreliable narrator if I have to use your word for it.
