Oh, Wilkie, you unreliable man!

I recently started reading Drood by Dan Simmons, which has been sitting on my to-be-read pile for way too long. I am only forty pages in, but I love it so far!

If you don’t know anything about Drood, why don’t you head on over to educate yourself before reading on? Don’t worry, I will wait for you.

*twiddles thumbs*

Okay. Synopsis read? Good. Now I will tell you what I love about Drood (don’t worry, I have barely broken into this huge tome, so this won’t be spoilery).

Wilkie Collins, our narrator, is horribly unreliable. From page one, there is a sense of professional jealousy. Wilkie was the writer who never got the fame, money, or recognition his buddy Charles Dickens got. He is bitter and prone to making snarky comments about Dickens. Also, he admits straight away to using copious amounts of opium. How can anything he says be taken as truth when he is under the influence of opium nearly always?

So, pretty much I am reading this book, not knowing what is real and what is not (okay, before you send the men in the white coats, let me say: I realize it is all fiction. I get that. But still…). How much of what Wilkie experiences is the effect of the drugs? How much of what he says about Charles Dickens is out of spite? I love not knowing!

I have been having a small love affair with Unreliable Narrator since I first read The Great Gatsby in high school. Nick Carraway is a brilliant example of an unreliable narrator–and one that has always fascinated me. After my first tryst with The Great Gatsby, I have always felt drawn to the unreliables. Perhaps this is why I enjoy the first-person POV so much; it is hard to get the full picture when everything is filtered through the eyes of one character.

Really, I could gush about Unreliable Narrator for way more words than you want to read. Instead, I will stop myself here and ask: who is your favorite unreliable narrator?

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