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Is Murderbot an Unreliable Narrator?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Not really, in my opinion, and I want to try and explain why.

Definitions

The term unreliable narrator has become somewhat watered down here on tumblr and in pop cultural discussions in general but I am working with what I learned at uni here. (Disclaimer: In academia too there are different definitions and approaches to unreliability but I'm going with the basics here)

For Wayne Booth, who first coined the term, "an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, omits or misrepresents important information, or presents inaccurate interpretations of events as objective truth." Peter J. Rabinowitz says "An unreliable narrator however, is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth' – what fictional narrator ever tells the literal truth? Rather an unreliable narrator is one who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience." (emphasis mine)

In other words, an unreliable narrator deceives the narrative audience (that is the implied in-universe audience), knowingly or unknowingly, in a way that significantly changes their interpretation of the narrative.

According to Greta Olson, there is "a differentiation between fallible and untrustworthy narrators" and "all fictional texts that employ the device of unreliability can best be considered along a spectrum of fallibility that begins with trustworthiness and ends with unreliability."

That means: It is not a binary of reliable vs. unreliable narrator. It is a sliding scale, a spectrum, and I would argue that on that spectrum, Murderbot falls closer to the trustworthy side than the unreliable.

General Thoughts

By and large, Murderbot presents the facts of the story to us truthfully. It does not withhold information from us that impacts our understanding of the events (see below for exceptions).

Are there moments where Murderbot's narration is fallible? Sure. It makes mistakes, particularly with judging people's intentions and their opinion of it. It consistently assumes people (especially "its" humans) think worse of it and trust it less than they actually do. It considers itself not important, and therefore assumes it is also not important to others. It also often rates it competence as much lower than it actually is.

But, and this is crucial: It does also tell us when it makes mistakes and often tells us the objective events in addition to its subjective assumptions or interpretations. By that I mean: It tells us its assumptions about the humans not thinking much of it and considering it expendable. But it also tells us the humans' words and actions that prove the opposite is true. It tells us about how incompetent and useless it is (especially in System Collapse) and then also tells us the sequence of events showing it actually is still capable of doing its job. It learns alongside us that its negative thoughts about itself aren't always true.

That's not unreliable narration.

Now, Murderbot's refusal to admit/discuss its emotions is the most common argument I've seen for MB being unreliable, and that is the one that probably bothers me the most.

Because a) A narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. MB refusing to discuss its feelings is a characterisation choice, but it's not keeping any vital information from us that we need to understand the story. There's gonna be narrators that focus more on outside descriptions and some that focus more on internal thoughts and perceptions and neither is inherently more unreliable than the other.

b) that being said imo MB's narration actually focuses A Lot on internal perceptions and feeling, in spite of it being so reluctant to talk about them. I think MB gives us a lot more emotion than we give it credit for. I would argue it doesn't actually hide all that much. It may often not be able to state its feelings outright, but that doesn't mean it doesn't tell us about them

As an example, let's look at the moment when Gurathin reveals its name to the PresAux group because that's always one that sticks in my mind with regard to MB and how it communicates its feelings

I opened my eyes and looked at him; I couldn’t stop myself. From their expressions I knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, “That was private.”

Murderbot doesn't actually tell us anything about what it's feeling here. It only tells us it's feeling something intense, and that it shows in its face, that the others can perceive it and react to it, and that it hates it. We can extrapolate what it's feeling of course: it's feeling betrayed and exposed and embarrassed and vulnerable (and angry but that's a given for MB). But I would argue it's not hiding that from us. It's given us the context we need to extrapolate what it's feeling because a) it doesn't want to talk about it directly so it does it indirectly and/or b) it wouldn't even know how to name the emotions it's feeling in that moment.

So I would say that MB does the best it can given its limitations (in experience and willingness to talk about feelings) to give us the most accurate view of its emotional state without having to talk about it. After all, we almost always know how it feels, or can at the very least guess at it. If it really was trying to hide its feelings from us (not from the other characters, it probably is actually pretty opaque to them most of the time) the narration would be reading very differently.

Looking at it from a Doylist perspective for a second: This is also stylistic choice on the part of Martha Wells, it's basic "show, don't tell": She doesn't simply tell us what Murderbot is feeling, she is showing us through its thoughts, actions and reactions and the reactions of other characters. That doesn't make Murderbot untrustworthy.

Now, I want to look at a few other passages and examples that are often brought up in this debate.

"the company"

Murderbot censoring the company name is not unreliable. Once we know that it does this, through Dr. Bharadwaj's mention of it, it is quite a telling characterisation choice imo, it tells us so much about MB's feelings towards the company and itself in relation to it. But, crucially: knowing the company's name would not at all change our understanding of this story. The company's name is completely irrelevant, UNLESS it suddenly turned out that the company was GrayCris or Barish-Estranza or some other corp we already know all along. We can say with some certainty that's not gonna happen, so: substituting the company for its actual name would change absolutely nothing about the story except to give us one less piece of characterisation for Murderbot. Therefore: not unreliable.

[redacted] in System Collapse

Here is another example of Murderbot deliberately concealing information from the audience, but I would still argue it doesn't make it unreliable because a) it doesn't hide from us the fact that it's concealing something. We know something has been redacted. It's the equivalent of a narrator saying "I can't talk about that right now." b) While the information is redacted, we are given enough context clues to have an idea of what [redacted] is. We know it's an incident that occurred recently that is likely trauma-related and that has caused Murderbot to lose confidence in itself and trust in its system/mind. c) Murderbot reveals the information to us voluntarily fairly early on in the book (exactly 40% in, thanks ebooks), when it becomes relevant for us to understand what's happening going forward. It does not in any significant way change our understanding of the events of the book up to that point, since we could already see the effects the incident had on MB all along. Therefore: not unreliable.

Murderbot refusing to admit it and ART are friends

What are you even talking about? In Exit strategy it tells us "my friend ART had changed my configuration". In Network Effect is says to Amena "my friend is dead" and it thinks to itself "It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could." So it later objects to the term friend when ART uses it after reinitialising and when Ratthi tries to talk to MB about their "friendship", and gave us "mutual administrative assistance" why? Because it's angry at ART. It feels betrayed and used and it's rightfully pissed off, so it can't think of ART as a friend in that moment. That's genuinely how it feels right then, and even if not: it's not uttering that refusal to us as the audience but to the characters in the story (ART and Ratthi). A character lying to other characters is not the same as the narrator lying to the audience. Therefore: not unreliable

MB not talking about/refusing to notice the relationships of the humans around it

I don't even know where to start with this one. Murderbot also routinely skips over descriptions of survery work and other things it finds boring because it simply does not care about them. As I said above, a narrator isn't obligated to discuss everything equally with the audience. In fact, a narration by necessity needs to limit a narrator's perception to what is relevant and important, because it is simply not possible to describe absolutely everything in equal measure. If Murderbot paid a lot of attention to human relationships, this would be a different kind of story. Therefore: not unreliable.

Murderbot has no emotional intelligence

Again, this isn't really a question of being unreliable at all, but I've seen it brought up in this context and it pissed me off so I wanna discuss it.

Literally one of the first things that happens in the series is MB talking to a terrified and in shock Volescu with gentleness and empathy and understanding, knowing exactly what it needs to say in order to keep him calm and get him out of danger, to the point that everyone in the survey is amazed at how well it handled this very emotionally fraught situation... only for some people to turn around and say Murderbot has no emotional intelligence?? the gall tbh

Having a negative self image (and a shitton of trauma) does not equal having no emotional intelligence. And let's not forget that Murderbot's bad opinion of itself and SecUnits it completely justified by its experiences and informed by a lifetime of being enslaved, objectified, abused and de"human"ised/having its personhood denied. Pretty much everyone it's ever met up until ASR has been either afraid of it or treated it as an appliance/toy, or both. It has limited education, very restricted life experiences and almost no actual interaction with other people, outside of receiving orders. Given all of that, I actually think it's shockingly sensitive and emotionally intelligent and regulated.

Murderbot didn't tell us about Ganaka Pit

Now this is the one instance where I can see the argument about Murderbot being unreliable applying.

With the very first sentence of ASR ("I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module ...") it at least implies that it hadn't done any mass murdering. It never tries to hide the fact that it and SecUnits in general are dangerous and murderous (see: murderbots), but iirc it doesn't give us any hint of Ganaka Pit until Gurathin brings it up about halfway through the first book (unlike the TV show where I think there are indistinct flashbacks from the start).

It does admit to the narrative audience at that point that it hasn't been entirely truthful and gives more context/information. It also admits that its memory of the incidence is unreliable and its conclusions about what happened are largely conjecture ("I think that’s what happened. ... And it makes a better story that way.")

I wouldn't say that this information significantly changes the story as we experienced it thus far, but it does change the way we perceive Murderbot. Personally I would call it more of a backstory reveal than an instance of unreliable narration, but an argument can definitely be made. You could say that Murderbot represented itself as safer than it was for the first half of the book (although I don't think it represents itself as very safe at all; it does keep emphasising how dangerous and horrifying it is.)

Therefore: Possibly unreliable.

Conclusion:

Murderbot is a fallible but mostly trustworthy narrator. It may underreport and misevaluate some things, but mostly those that are subject to subjective interpretation anyway (emotions, internal and external perceptions). When its assumptions or interpretations are incorrect, the audience is often made aware of that. As far as we can tell (i.e. unless there is a major plot twist coming up in the next book) there is no narrative or authorial intent of deceit or obfuscation.

Interpretation of narrative texts is not an exact science, and there are scholars who would say that narrative and authorial intent matters less than generic readers' assumptions, but this is what I, as a reader, believe given the information we receive from the text.

If you believe that Murderbot is an unreliable narrator, I likely won't change your mind. But I think what I and others are wary of in this debate is people using the "unreliable narrator" label as an excuse to pick and choose which parts of canon to believe and which to dismiss in order to reinforce their own ideas/preferences, rather than engaging with what the text actually gives us.

Take this as food for thought, if you want, and maybe sit with it for a while.

Or not, I can't make you.

Sources: Here and here for a general refresher on Unreliability

For the direct quotes

And credit where credit is due: All of this is built around my contributions to a discussion on the topic on the MB 2.0 discord. I only used my own words for this essay but of course my analysis was partially informed by thoughts and arguments brought up by others involved in that conversation.

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