Basic Trope: Insanity or an altered mental state makes a character's narration unreliable.
- Straight: Janet has semi-frequent Hallucinations which mess with her Point of View and, (by extension), ours.
- Exaggerated: Janet's warped perception means the audience can't determine what is true or false.
- Downplayed: Apart from a few hiccups caused by her naiveté, Janet's perception is lucid.
- Justified: Mental illness distorts one's worldview, and Janet is an undiagnosed sufferer.
- Inverted: Janet sees reality with crystal clarity, making her the perfect narrator.
- Subverted: Instead of Janet suffering hallucinations, her skewed perception comes from Bill manipulating her.
- The things Janet narrates to us, while freaky, are totally real.
- Double subverted: It turns out Janet was pulling a Wounded Gazelle Gambit on the readers this whole time.
- Parodied: Janet's "bubbliness" tells us she's probably a little off her rocker from the start.
- Zig Zagged: Janet may have some unaddressed mental health issues, but since she's not the protagonist of the story, they aren't too much of a problem... until she becomes more involved with things and her mental problems become exacerbated by the stress.
- Averted: Like everyone else, Janet has her biases, but otherwise she sees the world normally.
- Enforced:
- A character like Janet (or two) can give the Rashomoning the screwiness the author is going for.
- Knowing what a character experiences can make him/her more relatable and it's better to show than to tell.
- Lampshaded: Janet's narration has a distinctly playful feel.
- Invoked: Being around so many crazy personalities has made Janet a little crazy herself.
- Exploited: Janet is complicit in several illegal activities that occured in the story, and her scattered recollection is a ruse meant to throw the authorities off her trail.
- Defied: Janet is obsessed with getting at the whole truth, to the point where she ignores her hallucinations if they contradict what she already knows.
- Discussed: Janet often wonders just how insane you would have to be before you stopped using words altogether.
- Conversed: In her conversations with the audience, Janet frequently asks if she's becoming "too weird".
- Implied: While we don't see everything from her perspective, Janet shows several signs of disordered thinking and speech, including talking to people that aren't there—namely, us.
- Deconstructed: Janet is so psychotic the world through her eyes is almost completely unintelligible, making her narration useless.
- Janet's hallucinatory episodes are annoying but easily overlooked... until they begin to intrude on the plot.
- Janet's "insanity" is a side-effect of knowing she's a fictional character with no real qualia.
- Reconstructed: Janet knows she isn't very helpful as a narrator, but she strives to paint an accurate picture of things anyway.
- Since we know Janet's hallucinations are real, it means she's been telling us the truth the whole time, and thus her testimony is the most accurate record of the story's events.
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