Alex Jones, Unreliable Narrator

On finding truth in fiction

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

YOU MAY HAVE seen that a jury in Connecticut has ordered Alex Jones, head of the Infowars media empire, to pay the families of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary nearly $1 billion. Since 2012, Jones had emphatically claimed to his millions of followers that the mass shooting was a government hoax, “completely false,” a ploy to “come after our guns and start a civil war.” The grieving parents, Jones said, were crisis actors, playing roles to influence public opinion.

For me, the question here is why. In terms of how context and motivation matter, or at least help us understand, it can be helpful to examine first person narrators. By definition, we’re in their heads, listening to them tell the story. They have the ability to narrate in any way they’d like. Can they be trusted to give us the objective view? Not always. In literature, as in life, narrators come in degrees of unreliability.   

The term unreliable narrator was popularized in Rhetoric of Fiction, published in 1961. Wayne Booth writes that if a narrator is discovered to be untrustworthy, then the effect of the work they relay to us is transformed. Their unreliability makes a stronger demand, he writes, on the reader’s powers of inference.

The narrator might be untrustworthy in that they’re naïve. They’re showing the world around them in a way that we, as discerning readers and adult humans, begin to suspect might not be a full or accurate representation. We sense their blind spots. This is the case in Kazuo Ishiguro’s beautifully horrifying novel Never Let Me Go. Our narrator, Kathy H., starts out by telling us she’s 31 and a “carer,” a term she doesn’t define. The same goes for Hailsham, the “privileged estate” where Kathy says she’s lucky to be from. In the opening pages Kathy tells us many times that she’s unreliable.

“Maybe I’m remembering it wrong… This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong.”

But it’s not her memory that’s especially untrustworthy. It’s her indoctrinated worldview. Once we realize what sort of place Hailsham really was – and it’s a slow burn – along with what’s happening to Kathy in the present, we’re taken aback both by the cruelty of Kathy’s world and her acquiescence to it.

In Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, we’re confronted with a different kind of unreliability – a story narrated by an English butler who lets loyalty take precedence over morality as he justifies the actions of his long-time employer. Stevens admires Lord Darlington, who we come to understand had associated with the Nazis and died in public disgrace. He takes pains to explain away Lord Darlington’s misdeeds to the reader. But when other characters ask if Stevens had even worked for Lord Darlington, he denies it.

“I have chosen to tell white lies in both instances as the simplest means of avoiding unpleasantness.”

And there we have it: the unreliability of avoidance. If Stevens were to take a more objective view of Lord Darlington, he might have to question his own judgment and, in turn, his culpability.

The narrator in An Artist of the Floating World, another of Ishiguro’s novels, takes this idea to an extreme. There’s no degree of separation here – it’s the artist Masuji Ono himself who created propaganda for Japan’s Imperialist regime. It’s difficult for the reader to know if Ono’s role in the war was significant, or if he alone is making his actions out to be consequential, and to what end. What’s clear is that we’re getting Ono’s version of events.

Alex Jones is also a first-person narrator, a man speaking directly to his listeners and offering his own version of events. With our fictional characters, we can eventually see through their narrative directly into the parts of their character that drive their unreliability – Kathy’s naivete, Stevens’ insecurity, Ono’s fear of insignificance. But I believe they all know, consciously or not, that there’s more to the story than what they’re telling us.

In the real world, Jones admitted it. During a trial in Texas earlier this summer, he conceded he knew the Sandy Hook shooting was “100 percent real.”

In other words, he did not promulgate these theories because he especially believed them.

We could chalk his behavior up to money. In the Texas trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Infowars’ revenue spiked when Mr. Jones mentioned Newtown on his show. Even today, he’s actively using the Connecticut verdict to fundraise.

But it’s more than that. This is also about power. The ability to control a narrative, to convince millions of people that you know what’s really going on and now they do, too. Sometimes human desires – to feel knowledgeable, to find explanations for why the world isn’t how you’d like it to be, to feel like part of a group – drive us to suspend objective, rational reality and take a narrator at their word alone.

In fiction it’s fun to assess an unreliable narrator’s rendition of events and put together clues that help us see a bigger picture and the narrator for who they really are. When we believe unreliable narrators, even unwittingly, we’re implicated. Then something may happen to make us understand we’re being misled. There’s a contradiction, a revelation. In novels, we often gasp at these moments. They’re pleasurable. But I think we’re also relieved we’re no longer co-conspirators.  

What’s fun in fiction is deeply serious in reality. Just after Jones acknowledged the veracity of the tragedy he spent a decade calling a hoax, he said, “I unintentionally took part in things that did hurt these people’s feelings.”

A guilty plea to a lesser crime. Jones’ followers had issued rape threats, death threats, threats to dig up and defile children’s graves. The jury clearly felt more than hurt feelings were at stake.

In a novel, as in life, I would read that line as a clear indication of character.

In Other News…

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