Welcome to Day 9 of 40 craft lessons from 40 picture books.
A narrator brings us, readers, into the story world and honestly shares events and thoughts. Well… narrates, yes. Honesty? not necessarily.
An unreliable narrator doesn’t lie maliciously. They genuinely misunderstand or misinterpret a situation. And that’s exactly what makes them such a versatile tool in a writer’s toolkit. You’ve seen them in many masterpieces: Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
Unreliable narrators exist along a broad spectrum. In picture books, they are often lighthearted and charming, like Chickadee: Criminal Mastermind (2022, Monica Silvie, Elina Ellis).
Take a peek at the first two pages’ illustrations, and it quickly becomes clear: our little narrator, the self-proclaimed rapscallion, is excellent at exaggerating. His words paint one picture, but the illustrations tell another. The “vault of gold” that the criminal mastermind finds is a bird feeder!
When the “king of thieves” is sneaking treats from his vault, a child’s happy shout, “A bird found my feeder!”, jolts Chickadee into reality. He consults his underwing dictionary and, luckily, he finally understands what’s really going on. A sweet end.
Unreliable narrators aren’t just a writing tool. They invite readers to look at life from a different angle. When we watch Chickadee being so confidently wrong about the world, we might find ourselves wondering: Where do we exaggerate? Where are we blind to the obvious?
The unsettling truth about the human brain is that each of us, more or less, depending on our biases, is an unreliable narrator of our own world. We don’t see what’s actually happening; we see what we prefer to see, or what we fear to see. And perhaps that’s the very reason to introduce this idea early on, through stories that gently show how delightfully, harmlessly wrong we can be.
I hope reading this blog post has given you new ideas. See you tomorrow for Day 10.
