The Post-Modern Narrative (Elec's Excerpt #3, draft 3)

Since WWI, the traditional third-person omniscient narrative voice has fallen from popular use. Authors reason, "Life doesn't have an all-powerful voice revealing new and interesting facts to us - why should literature?"

Thus was born the occasionally confusing but indubitably realistic concept of narrative unreliability.

Just as people can lie, mislead, and get their facts wrong, so, too, can first-person narrators. Emily Bronte was massively ahead of her time with the idea when she filtered Heathcliff's story through Nelly. Faulkner pushed it to its limits when he recounted Addie's death in As I Lay Dying. Modern literature teaches its readers to distrust the ostensible story line.

Cut to the Post-modern era. Authors know their first-person narrators are inherently unreliable and, more importantly, readers know to question the stories such narrators convey. However, rarely do authors provide multiple perspectives for readers to compare with each other and thus deduce the true tale.

How, then, are readers to look beyond the filters of their narrators to the truth?

To start? Readers must remember that, as in life, the more frequently a speaker insists upon something as true, the more that something should be questioned.