Unreliable Narrator/Real Life
Examples of Unreliable Narrators in Real Life include:
- Schliemann, archaeologist. Yes, he did achieve quite a lot. Digging up Troy for example (destroying quite a bit of it in the process). His part of the story always leaves out those inconvenient little things like, you know, bribery, black market, some illegal things, nothing big, really. And backstabbing his benefactor Frank Calvert (by not crediting him and basically taking away his land) who just happened to lack funds enough to do the research himself? Wherever did you get that idea?
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. There's no doubt that Cellini was a great artist, but he was also an incredible egotist, judging by all the self-congratulation, exaggeration and distortion in his autobiography. That does make it an entertaining read, of course.
- And in the same vein, the autobiographies of Giocomo Casanova - some tend to enjoy the book more if they treat it as fiction.
- Most small children tend to be this when telling you a story or their side of the events of something.
- This can be particularly damaging if a child is used as a witness in a trial. Their testimonies can sometimes be so ridiculously inaccurate, that many feel courts shouldn't bother asking for them.
- A great real-life example is one Charlie Smith, who in the early 1970s became a media celebrity after making the extraordinary claim of having been born in Liberia in 1842, making him the oldest man on record. He thrived on the lineup of reporters and interviewers who visited him at his Florida nursing home, relating colorful tales of his being tricked into coming to America as a slave, escaping, fighting for the Union in the Civil War, then heading out West where, among other exploits, he rode with Jesse James. His yarns were swallowed up because he was a likeable old coot, a magnificent Deadpan Snarker, and, well, he looked like he could be pushing 130. NASA gave him a VIP seat to watch the launch of Apollo 17, and his life story was dramatized in an episode of the PBS television series "Visions" titled "Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree." He died in 1979 at the alleged age of 137, and his obituary made national news. Thereafter, however, more level-headed research established his actual birth year as either 1874 or 1879, making him, at best, 105 upon his demise.
- Everyone is an unreliable narrator to some extent. We self-edit our memories of events, usually to cast ourselves in a better light or look less guilty, we mix up events, we forget things, or we even plain just start makes things up. This even happens whether we intend to or not. For example, Ulric Neisser did an experiment on the day after the Challenger Disaster, where he had all of his students fill out a detailed questionnaire of what they were doing when they first heard about the accident; then, 2 years later, he had the same students try to remember the events and rewrite the same questionnaire. The result was that only 10% of the subjects remembered most of the major details correctly (25% of the subjects got every scrap of detail wrong, and everyone made minor errors). The same experiment is repeated after 9/11, to the same results. This is because of the supercomputer-melting mountains of data and stimuli that the brain processes each day, only a small amount is coded down as long-term memory by neural connections, we mostly resort to doing subconscious educated guesses and general filling-in-the-blanks to string together a coherent narrative.
- This is also why eyewitness testimony is considered the most untrustworthy piece of evidence in court.
- If you're studying Logic or Psych, you may run across such maxims as "memory is constructive" and "memory is selective"; in other words, we make up our memories afterwards (or as we go along), and then only remember the parts and pieces that we want to (or "can").
- It has also been found that the memories tend to be altered slightly each time they are recollected simply due to the processes involved in recollection. This is beyond memory being "selective" or "constructive", it's more just normal wear and tear.
- It can also work the other way where people with small egos will downplay their accomplishments or believe they were being cruel. Remembering their childhood can make them think they were a horrible brat when their parents remember them being well behaved. They could have a partner who calls them loving and perfect, whereas they believe they are neglectful and insulting. There have been cases of depression caused by this self-induced guilt because the person suffering from it honestly believes they are a horrible person.
- Older Than Feudalism: The Ancient Greek historial Herodotus, famously. So much so that he is called both the Father of History and the Father of Lies.
- Xenophon.
- Julius Caesar.
- Really, any and all historians are subject to this. No matter how unbiased they try to be, there's always some level of it present.
- Before it was deleted, Troper Tales was this in spades, which is, in fact, why it was deleted.
- The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. He had a tendency, both in person, in his diary and his autobiography, to ignore events that he didn't remember fondly, ending up with a seemingly overly rosy life of manly exploits and little unfortune, if he said so himself. His first wife, who died young, on Valentine's Day, days after the birth of their only daughter, is never mentioned at all, and his parents, mentioned as being just about the greatest persons who ever lived, just disappear. He goes places and does things for seemingly no reason, as the context was too bitter and he abandons it with little to no explanation, for the same reason.
- Turn-of-the-20th-Century raconteur, playwright and con-man Wilson Mizner and his brother influential Floridian architect Addison Mizner both made outrageous claims about their lives, some of which were only found to be... embellished... after their deaths in the 1930s. In Wilson's case, the difficulty in identifying the bogus parts of his life story was only enhanced by how over-the-top the true parts were -- see the linked Wikipedia article for details.
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