LINDSAY ELLIS: Who is the most powerful character in fiction?

Villains may doom the world, heroes may save it, but no one has more control over the plot than the narrator, expositing the who, the what, the where, the when, the how directly into the reader's mind.

Whether it's first person limited or third person omniscient, the narrator controls the pacing, chooses the language, and is often the moral compass, telling you who to root for and how you should feel about what happens.

The reader listens, believes, and empathizes.

So what happens when the person telling the story isn't telling the whole story?

How can you even tell when a narrator is an unreliable one?

If I can't trust the storyteller, who can I trust?

An unreliable narrator is one who perceives and/or presents the events of a story in a way that is either skewed or disconnected from the real world-- or the fictional real world.

The real fictional-- you know what I mean.

The term unreliable narrator was coined in 1961 by literary critic Wayne C Booth in his book "The Rhetoric of Fiction."

"I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work-- which is to say, the implied author's norms-- unreliable when he does not."

Which is to say, a narrator is unreliable when he or she or they do not share the perspective of reality or morality shared by the author and the reader.

Recorded examples of storytellers who cannot be trusted go as far back as early Greek and Roman plays, like "Miles Glorious," as a braggart soldier whose tales of conquest fail to hide the reality that he is, in fact, just a dim witted coward.

These swaggering blowhards became stock characters in theater, like Shakespeare's Falstaff, and continue into modern times with characters like the office's Michael Scott.

We enjoy hearing the plot filtered through their skewed perspectives, because we know we're not fooled.

We get to laugh at their vanity and their naivete while decoding what really happened.

But other unreliable narrators aren't so ha-ha harmless.

Edgar Allan Poe's narrator in "The Cask of Amontillado" justifies chaining a man in a dungeon and walling him up while he's still alive by saying it's revenge for an insult.

We don't know what this insult is, but just trust him, it's bad.

It's definitely wall you up so you suffocate until you die bad.

The narrator of Nabokov's "Lolita," Humbert Humbert, depicts his gross obsession with a 12-year-old girl as some grand romantic adventure, even though he's writing it from a jail cell.

And the first half of "Gone Girl" has us choosing sides between the alternating accounts of a missing woman and her accused husband, while the second half, well, basically confirms the fact that we can't trust anyone and marriage is a bad idea.

All of these narrators assume that they are successfully manipulating the audience the same way they manipulate everyone else.

But the authors are counting on their readers to have a more sophisticated moral compass.

Other narrators are more unintentionally unreliable.

In "The Telltale Heart," Poe's narrator is sincerely convinced that he can hear his murdered roommate's heart beating accusingly beneath the floorboards as the authorities questioned him.

In Henry James's "Turn of the Screw," a well-intentioned but truly disturbed governess unwittingly torments her two young wards, because she thinks that they are possessed by ghosts that, spoilers, may not actually exist.

And by the end of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club," there aren't quite as many characters, as we thought there were.

These narrators aren't lying per se, they're just recounting the events as they truly see them, through minds distorted by fear, or guilt, or Ikea induced emasculation.

But you don't have to be wicked or insane to be an unreliable narrator.

You can also just be really, really "innocent."

Forest Gump's version of landmark historical events comes off as remarkably, perhaps annoyingly, quaint, and the reader sees through his too trusting assessment of other characters.

In "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," the narrator's autism challenges the audience to piece together the mystery from his childlike observations.

And William Faulkner's Southern Gothic novel, "Sound and Fury," features a whole family full of unreliable narrators, and famously opens with a convoluted, almost pre-linguistic narration from the point of view of a mentally impaired man.

His stream of consciousness is difficult to follow, to say the least.

In fact, the title of Faulkner's novel comes from Macbeth's what's the point speech in which he says that life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Perhaps the most iconic example of the innocent unreliable narrator is Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn."

Through much of the novel, Huck struggles with the morality of aiding the escape of a black slave named Jim.

Society has taught Huck that slavery is just and moral, and violating this sacred institution makes him a sinner, a term he uses to describe himself over and over.

The author and the reader both know, hopefully, that it's the system that is wicked, not this kid.

So the reader can't help but cheer when Huck utters the famous line, "all right, then, I'll go to hell."

So how does the unreliable narrator enhance the reader's experience?

Well, that depends on how it's revealed.

In the case of Huck Finn, Humbert Humbert, or Michael Scott, the reader is aware pretty much the whole time that there's something off about this narrator's version of events, so we get to experience the story through two different lenses simultaneously, ours and the narrator's.

And we assume that ours is the correct one.

In a way, the narrator skewed perspective crystallizes what it is about the true perspective that makes it true.

But when the unreliability of the narrator comes as a surprise to us, the experience can be kind of unpleasant.

Instead of feeling smart, we might feel unmoored and gullible.

It might make us wonder how many other biased accounts have we fallen for.

In the era of Twitter bots and fake news, it might be good praxis to be skeptical about taking stories at face value.

But there's an even deeper fear than that.

Perhaps we are our own unreliable narrator.

Psychologists often divide human consciousness into two selves, the experiencing self and the narrating self.

The experiencing self feels sensations and emotions, happiness, fear, pain, pleasure.

And the narrating self spins all of this input into a story to make sense of it all.

I feel pain in my belly, says the experiencing self.

Well, that's because you skipped lunch, says the narrating self.

So let's have a snack.

Ah, that feels better, says the experiencing self.

See, I told you so, says the narrating self.

We tend to accept our narrating self as plain reality, but narrating self is just a storyteller like any other, susceptible to fallacies, emotions, and prejudices, and biases.

We often tell ourselves what we want to hear, conveniently omitting facts that make us uncomfortable.

And in the age of social media, we're not just narrating our stories to ourselves, we're telling them to the world.

Are we narrating life as it actually is, or are we skewing our stories?

Editing and cropping our best most idyllic photos while deleting unflattering ones.

Choosing to post about our good days, but not our bad days.

Are we #blessed or #grateful when we're #reallynotatall?

Unreliable narrators remind us that we are fallible and that other people can have vastly different perspectives.

They help us understand why we believe the things that we do or pushes to change those beliefs altogether.

They encourage the reader to see the world through multiple lenses.

So maybe the most powerful character in literature is not actually the narrator.

Maybe it's you, the reader, trained with a critical eye, an open mind, and an armful of good books.

"The Great American Read" is a series on PBS about our love of books.

Streaming episodes on demand, or head to PBS.org/greatamericanread for more info.

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