There are so many ways a narrator can be unreliable. The is the consciously deceptive narrator, lying to the reader, yet so many facets even within that: a teacher toning down complexity for children, a statesman fudging facts to make a flattering autobiography, an apologist hiding the bad sides of a sect, a murderer concealing evidence until the grand reveal. There are unconscious lies: the child who repeats the toned-down version for another, the scholar trusting the fudged autobiography, the initiate who doesn't know the bad sides of a sect, a murder who has concealed who did it even from himself. And without lies, a narrator can still deceive. He can be biased, valorizing, and demonizing. He can be ignorant, not knowing to call that stiff white bird an airplane, or that colored cloth a flag. He can be ignorant of the true significance of events, telling or writing before some great discovery, or after one, which distorts his perspective, focus, and omissions. He can be decided: by his education, by propaganda, by his senses, by his friends. he can be insane. He can be unaware that he's insane, or know he is insane in some ways yet manifest other different insanities. He can be too credulous, or not credulous enough, mistaking illusions for true miracles, or miracles for illusions. He can have a faulty memory—oh, how many ways a narrator can have a faulty memory! and he can be filtered—as Wolfe's appendices claim of Severian—distorted by translation, alteration, time's erosion, as a translator of Homer struggles with hapax legomena, groping towards meaning as we grope to understand Severian's words. Or a narrator can be Severian the Torturer, the onion, the matryoshka, whose layered unreliabilities keep unfolding over chapters, books, cueing more and more ways that we must doubt, and double-check, and read between the lines, questioning things that he believes, believing things he doubts. As we dig layer after layer, like Scliemann seeking Troy, we find at the bottom that there is no bottom, that plumbing the layers was the artwork in itself, and that if we sought the layer closest to the truth it is best found by starting over—like a solar cycle—from page one. As an example of narration, Severian teaches that reliability is not a yes/no binary, nor gimmick, trick, or tool, but at its best a journey in itself, as complex to explore as any plot.
