Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
[...]No question that some books would be spoilt by knowing the narrator is unreliable going in, but it doesn't really matter for others. Either it's obvious from the start or the reader should have been reserving judgment anyway, that is, I think any first person account should imply the possibility that all is not as the narrator assumes or chooses to tell. [...]
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Since suspense is my go-to genre, I've read many books where the twist is that the narrator you've been trusting all along is actually a diabolical liar, and of course revealing that is a spoiler. But often the unreliability is clear from the outset--the narrator has memory loss, for example, and is trying to piece together what happened. [...]
|
Yes, it's clear that some unreliable narrators are not (necessarily) guilty, but my point was that "some stories" (sic) - that would otherwise seem a perfect fit to the theme - become excluded by the spoiler effect. I had a couple in mind before I realised this (just slow, I guess), and had to go back and reconsider.