What an Unreliable Narrator Can Teach Us

Every life is edited before it is understood. We remember beginnings and farewells with startling clarity, while ordinary afternoons vanish or blur into a general feeling of time passing. A conversation returns in fragments: the expression across the table, a particular word, the scent of rain on pavement. The missing minutes are not empty; they are filled with inference, habit and the versions of events we have repeated to ourselves.

That process makes the unreliable narrator in life more than a literary device. The lesson of the unreliable narrator in life is not that people are always lying. It is that sincerity and certainty can occupy the same sentence, and that a confident voice can still edit the evidence for dramatic effect.

We recognise this most easily when accounts conflict. One person remembers a family argument as a necessary reckoning; another recalls an ordinary exchange made painful by exhaustion. Both accounts may carry conviction. Neither is a neutral camera pointed at the past. To tell a life is to choose a vantage, a rhythm and a degree of candour.

Attending to that choice does not make us cynical. It can make us more generous towards other people and more exact about ourselves. Fiction, memoir and testimony offer different ways to examine the gap between what happened and what can honestly be said about it.

Memory is a narrator, not a recording

Memory is a narrator, not a recording. It works from clues rather than transcripts, and those clues shift with mood, age and purpose. Selective memory can sharpen a remembered argument, giving it clearer dialogue each year, while a tender gesture fades. The mind also rearranges emphasis: what once seemed incidental can become the whole scene, and what once felt central may disappear. This is not a mechanical failure that effort alone can correct.

Good fiction teaches us to notice these movements. An unreliable narrator may hide a fact, contradict an earlier claim, misname a feeling or speak with a certainty unsupported by events. In life, the same techniques are less tidy and more ordinary. Loyalty can turn an enemy into a villain. Hindsight can turn a hesitant decision into obvious folly. A private grievance may select details that make an entire relationship seem predictable.

The corrective is not to dismiss every account as false. It is to ask what kind of truth each version can support. Receipts, photographs, letters, calendars and independent recollections can check a story without making it perfect. Their value lies in showing where memory has filled a gap. A reliable account does not require perfect agreement; it requires the teller to mark uncertainty rather than disguise it.

Truth depends on the telling

Every account also reflects the power to define events. Civil rights histories make this difficult to forget: a public record can describe a movement while omitting the fear, humour and private reasoning of those who lived through it. A committee report, newspaper article or official file can be accurate within its purpose yet still reflect the priorities of the person who wrote it. The record is evidence, but evidence has a point of view.

Questions of race sharpen the point. In Australia, conversations about this country often bring together First Nations accounts of Country, European migration narratives and the experiences of later arrivals. These histories overlap without becoming interchangeable. To treat one as the final version would be to confuse authority with completeness. Honest history preserves complexity, including differences between what a record states and what communities remember.

Personal testimony has a different responsibility again. A novel may deliberately withhold a fact to let the reader examine a voice; a memoir invites confidence but cannot abolish the limits of memory. The most credible witness is not necessarily the most polished. Often it is the witness who can say what happened, acknowledge what remains uncertain and resist the temptation to make other people fit a tidy verdict.

The stories we inherit

Family histories are among the most persistent works of fiction we inherit. A grandmother’s recollection of leaving Ireland may become an official family myth, complete with a ship, a suitcase and a last goodbye. Each retelling changes the accent of the story, even when the facts remain stable. Younger members may know the outline but not the doubts, and older members may hear a threat where later generations hear only an adventure.

Franklin’s An Irish Experience offers a fitting way into this subject because its title places an encounter before an act of possession. Ireland is approached through lived experience, which suggests something richer and less stable than a checklist of landmarks. An encounter can alter the visitor and the visited place. A travelogue can therefore be about geography while also examining the traveller’s assumptions, especially the urge to turn a living culture into a personal story.

Inheritance can also work through fiction. The title of Gideon’s Children brings a sense of descent to mind: children receive traits, promises and unresolved questions along with family stories. They may inherit a loyal version of a relative’s life, complete with missing facts and concealed conflicts. Reading such a novel can prompt a harder question than whether a narrator is honest: what does a family reward us for repeating?

Cities tell competing stories

Cities are narrators too, and they change according to where a person stands. On a weekday morning in Sydney, a commuter may see a train crowded with people carrying coffee across the harbour; in Melbourne, a tram might pass workers heading into the central business district. From a car in either city, the same journey can look like a sequence of motorways, signs and distance. Transport, work and weather determine the story’s texture as much as any grand event does.

Everyday routines offer still finer versions. A flat white in one suburb may be a long black in another, a point of local pride that can become a small family dispute. A visit to Queen Victoria Market or the Sydney Fish Market turns food into a record of season, migration and bargaining. Weekly shopping at Coles or Woolies establishes a familiar rhythm, while farmers’ markets turn local production into a brief, crowded theatre of choice.

Public commemorations create larger competing accounts. Australia Day and ANZAC Day gather people around shared dates, but the meanings attached to those dates can differ sharply between generations and communities. The law offers another check on storytelling. The Australian Consumer Law makes misleading or deceptive commercial conduct unlawful. Autobiography is not commerce, yet the same test remains useful: the presentation should earn trust rather than substitute a preferred version for what can be verified.

A discipline of honest attention

This suspicion need not poison ordinary conversation. Handled as a practice of attention rather than a performance of cynicism, it sharpens our reading of novels, memoirs and news reports. Certain patterns deserve a second look:

• A decisive claim fills a gap where the evidence is missing.
• Dates, names or sequences shift between retellings.
• “Everyone knew” appears, although no source is named.
• An absent person becomes conveniently wicked.
• Motives are declared certain without being tested.

A second set of habits keeps that attention constructive. Instead of asking only whether a story pleases us, we can examine how it was built and what other evidence might alter it:

• Separate what happened from how it felt at the time.
• Mark the places where the viewpoint narrows.
• Compare accounts without forcing artificial agreement.
• Allow silence without inventing a motive for it.
• Revise the story when new evidence changes its weight.

Together, these habits replace casual suspicion with disciplined curiosity. They also protect us from a familiar trap: treating our own discomfort as proof of deception. Discomfort may indicate bias, but it may also expose a perspective we have not yet examined. The reader’s task is not to convict the narrator; it is to keep the account open long enough to learn its limits.

Carry the story forward

Howard G. Franklin’s author website brings his work together in a form that mirrors this subject. Visitors can find information about his life and books, read blog posts on literature, Ireland, civil rights and race, and explore excerpts, reviews and media interviews. The arrangement matters because a biography, a novel and a travelogue tell their subjects in different ways. The site records Franklin’s passing in 2016 while preserving the questions and voices that made his work worth encountering.

A biography depends on recollection and record. A novel may reveal the pressure inside a narrator’s voice. A memoir-travelogue places one person’s experience against another landscape. Interviews add another layer, capturing a person thinking through a subject rather than presenting a perfectly polished conclusion. Together, these forms encourage readers to notice what each medium can reveal, what it cannot, and how much certainty belongs to the teller rather than the subject.

Explore Gideon’s Children and An Irish Experience through the website’s publication details and links to booksellers, then return to the blog, excerpts and interviews for the wider context. Read them as windows rather than mirrors. A good book can correct the tidy stories we tell about family, place and justice. Choosing what to read, comparing the evidence and allowing a narrator to be fallible can make our own accounts more candid without making them less compassionate.