You may not be a writer or even fancy yourself a storyteller, but like it or not, we are all narrators. I’ve written about reliable narrators before. S/he can take us anywhere, and oh, how we love being transported, even if it means imagining ourselves as Gregor the salesman turned cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unreliable narrators keep us guessing, either deliberately or unwittingly. The reader may be guessing, but the author is not. She knows her characters’ backstories and motivations and is very deliberate about plotting their behavior.
Our lives are populated with narrators, reliable and unreliable, and it is left to us to be discerning. We have our favorite news sources and other trusted narrators in friends and families, colleagues, doctors, counselors, and various advisors. Likewise, we narrate events to others as well as to ourselves. How trustworthy are we as narrators? Are our intentions good when we are sharing something about someone else? Is our view biased? Are we telling our story without the benefit of knowing the characters’ backstories and motivations? Are we driven by a need to be right, to sit on that holier than thou perch of judgment? Gosh, it feels good on that perch, doesn’t it? We can see so far and wide. But when the bough inevitably breaks, unlike raptors, we can’t take flight and the landing can be rough.
And what about the narrator in your head? Is she balanced in her judgment or is she too hard on you? Or perhaps too easy? Is she really echoing your mother, your former teacher, a tough boss, an ex? And does she ever give it a rest?!
In Polonius’ oft-quoted farewell speech to his son Laertes in the first act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he says:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Good advice that can be hard to follow with a cacophony of other voices in and all around us, but it’s worth finding that still point where you can hear you, because that voice? That voice is a like a torch in the dark, a scythe in high fields, a whisper that is heard over all the other noise. That’s a reliable narrator.
Divine Ready 