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Unreliable Narrator requires a Narrator. Unreliable Expositor requires Mr. Exposition.
An Unreliable Narrator can be a character within the story. In fact, that's the most common form of it.
Edited by TheMountainKing on Mar 28th 2020 at 1:44:10 PM
The way I see it, the narrator is talking to the audience, the expositor is talking to the characters.
This distinction makes sense to me.
What about a Framing Device situation, where a character recounts something and it is treated as narration?
Blapper of Water
It's a question of whether the story is being narrated, so "it [being] treated as narration" answers the question. The character would be talking indirectly to the audience, and that is enough to make it Unreliable Narrator.
At the end of the day, even exposition is just the author talking to the audience, so it's really only a technicality that it isn't considered "narration" per se. Thus, "narration" supersedes "exposition" in gray areas such as Framing Device situations.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
It's mostly that Unreliable Narrator is technically about the narration of the story, but by it's nature also tends to count for in-story narration like with Metaphorically True. It's a distinction that's near impossible to separate.
But at the end of the day, narration doesn't have to come from in universe characters. That should be simple...
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
Are my definitions correct?
Because I was browsing the UnreliableNarrator.Comic Books subpage and 90% of examples seem to describe what I defined as Unreliable Expositor.
Edited by eroock on Mar 28th 2020 at 3:09:40 AM