Wayne Booth, who first coined the term “unreliable narrator,” observed that “a narrator [is] reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work...unreliable when he does not.” His framing of this concept emphasizes the collaboration between reader and (implied) author in making sense of the narrator. Since then, the concept has been widely used and hotly contested not just among narratologists but in the culture at large. In popular parlance, however, the ascription of unreliability to another person does not activate a process of collaboration; instead, it signifies one’s unwillingness to go along with a lie or fallacy. Unlike in fiction, the ostensibly unmediated communication that happens IRL is generated by the speakers themselves, rather than an authorial figure behind the scenes. This panel will try to scale the wall that is conventionally placed between unreliable narration in fiction and the ascription of unreliable narration in real-life communication by discussing what they have in common.

The panelists seek to examine several undertheorized uses of unreliable narration, exploring narrative unreliability diachronically and across genres. What gets accomplished by talking about real-life people as unreliable narrators? How does nonliterary unreliability prompt scholarly reformulation of literary unreliable narration and authorial intention?

Faye Halpern tackles a question begged both by Booth’s amicable theorization of unreliable narration and the divisive use it has been put to in contemporary culture wars: what kind of critique does unreliable narration afford? Works like “A Modest Proposal” have led scholars to think unreliable narration affords a robust critique. Against this view, Halpern observes how unreliable narration in literature and in the wild tends to fail at reforming those the author thinks most in need of reform. As narratologists from Booth to Peter Rabinowitz have demonstrated, the ascription of unreliability requires one to imagine another person’s intentions; Halpern builds on this theorization by examining how the target of a critique based on unreliability is unlikely to agree with how the other person characterizes them. Using the critical reception of Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a case study–specifically, how literary critics have unhesitatingly seen it as partaking in either neo-liberal or feminist critique–we can understand why unreliable narration provides very sharp arrows for vanishingly small targets.

Laura Scales will next interrogate gaslighting as one iteration of the many forms of unreliable narrating that currently infect our culture. Drawing parallels from the present to the fraught and often violent factionalism of the 1850s, when pro-slavery writers frequently employed fiction in misinformation campaigns to destroy the lay reader’s faith in the realities of slavery, she reads plantation fiction like Eastman’s 1852 “Aunt Phillis’s Cabin” as gaslighting readers into doubting themselves as valid interlocutors in real-life cultural narratives. Whereas James Phelan’s model for unreliable narrators empowers readers through their realized inability to trust the narrator, Scales argues that gaslighters’ unreliability threatens to rupture ethical boundaries by disempowering the reader as a valid interlocutor with the text and the world.

Finally, Ellen Stenstrom calls attention to a curious category that blurs these usages: contemporary memoirists who call themselves unreliable narrators. Each author—a woman writer of color—braids cultural critique with personal anecdotes that explore her experience with varying forms of trauma and/or psychological distress. Memoirists like Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House) and Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feeling) write in a context of near-ubiquitous imperatives for compulsive self-examination and self-exposure and of proliferating systems that require “confession” to gain recognition or cultural legibility, and yet also refuse to have their experiences silenced. Stenstrom therefore argues that self-declared unreliability should be seen both as protection through opacity or plausible deniability and as a tool for reconstituting narratorial agency.