How MeToo Changed the Unreliable Narrator Forever

I have a piece at LitHub today about Women Talking and the new narrative strategies of post-MeToo feminist fiction. You can read my original piece on Women Talking from this blog here.

Sometimes, we have to kill our darlings: after some painstaking work on a whole section of the piece, I ended up cutting it; it was weighing down the rest of the analysis. The section explored two pre-MeToo novels that exemplify the “before” of what I’m trying to show. One of them, The People in the Trees, I wrote about two years ago on this blog. Though I don’t consider Yanagihara’s book to quite fit the ‘post-reliable’ movement I define in my piece, hers is a kind of proto-post-reliable gesture that merits close study.

I thought I’d share some of the section here; it didn’t make the cut, and it remains rather inachevé, but it will probably still feature in this project in some way (if I ever manage to define what that project is!), so I thought I’d give it some air.

Feedback welcome! XO

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There is a notable tradition of using the unreliable narrator in stories of sexual abuse, though I’d argue that what distinguishes a feminist work of this nature is subtle and tenuous.

Consider the distinction in narrative techniques between two books written a little more than a decade apart: JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013). In both novels, perpetrators of sexual abuse who are also men of high social standing (a professor, a scientist) narrate their version of events, ostensibly in attempt to clear their names after being accused of, and facing consequences for, sexual misconduct. 

In both books, these unreliable perpetrator-narrators erase their own “I” as they assert it, a masterful way to deconstruct their authority. But the difference between Coetzee’s narrator and Yanagihara’s – and what inscribes the latter more firmly in a feminist storytelling tradition – is the frame narrative in The People in the Trees. Along with a fictional news article describing the criminal indictment of the narrator, Yanagihara opens the novel with a letter by a friend and acolyte of the perpetrator, defending his imprisoned teacher. This voice proceeds to offer literal footnotes throughout his teacher’s first-person account, doubling the effect of the unreliable narrator as he annotates and shapes the story at hand.

What exactly is his stake in protecting a man found guilty of sexual abuse? Unlike in Coetzee’s novel, where plot and characters (like the narrator’s daughter) do the work of undermining narrative authority, Yanagihara’s narrator is indicted by the frame around him. His entourage’s willingness to protect him becomes the subject of the novel, and the object of the reader’s reflection and horror. 

Even still, the mystery that drives most of Yanagihara’s novel remains an incredulous one (did he really do it?), and I’d argue that this undermines its feminist message. The more we learn about the protagonist, both from his own account and his friend’s notes, the more we scratch our heads as we try to square the man on the page with the criminal the court found him to be. This inevitably invites an assessment of his victim’s account: that is to say, when the mystery is how he could’ve done it, it is also whether a survivor is telling the truth.

When that line of thinking can prevail, a story risks reifying the very mechanisms of rape culture that made the violence possible. Both Disgrace and The People in the Trees are books that want us to learn about those mechanisms from the source––but even toying with the possibility of their characters’ redemption or exoneration keeps us all too complicit. Having been conscripted as accomplices, we’re not any closer to understanding victims; instead, we’re stuck with the same nauseating cognitive dissonance as before.