In Tom Keely, Winton has created a narrator whose misfortune and fury is matched by a merciless and mordant wit, and Winton has rarely been funnier.
I can only assume that McGrath has no friends with this diagnosis, and sought out no one whose personal experience might assist him in his task of creating a narrator with schizophrenia.
The beauty of the novel is that Antrim has created a narrator who reproduces, in the reader, the same volatile mixture of feelings regarding the narrator himself: Doug is at once irresistibly lovable and unbearably frustrating.
It is an allegorical tale, but feels immediate and sharply detailed, not remote; it's on a tiny scale (a week in a nameless English village community, once upon a time) but seems potent and important; and it creates a narrator – the isolated widower Walter Thirsk – with a slightly archaic but spellbinding voice.
William Morris built on Chaucer in his novel A Dream of John Ball, published in 1888, creating a narrator who was openly sympathetic to the peasant cause, albeit a 19th-century persona taken back to the 14th century by a dream.
"We knew we wanted to create an unreliable narrator, or, at least, someone whom most other people looked at as being unreliable, in part because of her youth, in part because of her record, and in part because of her gender," Gordon said of Carrie.
When my editor pointed out that I needed to make the information more informal and accessible, I created a chirpy narrator, Jess Wood, to tell the story.
Put another way, I think Wyndham has deliberately created a fallible narrator, who often doesn't understand the story he's telling.
As you might expect from a man who has become famous while simultaneously effacing himself, creating an unreliable narrator comes easily to Marcos.
But is it?In this section The generation game Texas v Paris, the prequel Lovely moments Lying Thomas raises doubts Hollow laughs Heavy lettering ReprintsMr Wood has created an unsettling narrator about whom he himself seems undecided.
