We Are Unreliable Narrators of Our Own Lives

The Unreliable Narrator is a device used in novels, plays, and films, wherein the character telling the story does not fully understand what is really going on.  Most often it is used for comic effect.  Examples include the film "Raising Arizona," the film "Badlands" and the "Jeeves and Wooster" novels of PG Wodehouse.  In these, the narrator is dimwitted, and the disconnect between what we see happening in the story and the narrator's understanding of what's going on is very funny.  Occasionally the Unreliable Narrator is used for tragic effect, the best example I can think of is the Terence Malick film "Days of Heaven" in which the narrator is a young girl, possibly mentally disabled, who's misinterpretation of the events of the film is sad indeed. 

I believe that we are unreliable narrators of our own lives.  Our minds provide a constant stream of interpretation and the assignment of meaning to What is Happening to us, why we do what we do, and it is often objectively incorrect. Sometimes the result is comic, more often it is tragic.

I suspect that many people, like me, have an Inner Critic that is constantly telling them that they are not good enough, that they make lots of mistakes and that they need to try harder and do better in order to be a worthwhile human being,  I have learned over the years to tame my Inner Critic, but I am also aware that I have a tendency to assign meaning to events that suggest that I am inadequate. I ignore the obvious evidence that (some) people like me and value me.  

Others suffer from the opposite problem -- they think that they are smarter, better-informed, morally superior, etc. etc.  They display this inflated self-appreciation every day on social media.  They tend to become politicians, it seems to me.

I'm no psychotherapist, but I've learned enough about human nature to recognise that many of our problems and achievements arise not from what happens to us but from what we tell ourselves it means.  Some people adopt narratives of victimhood, others of superiority.  

There's a valuable lesson to be learned from the studies of how faulty memories can be.  Without getting too much into the science, we should understand that memories are not recordings, they are reconstructions.  A famous study of faulty memory comes from research on American's recollections on where they were and what they were doing in 2 November 1962, the day that US President John Kennedy was assassinated (sorry, I can't locate a reference).  Many Americans could recall very clearly that they were at home listening to a baseball game on the radio (TVs were not yet common in homes in 1962.)  They could tell you who was playing, what the score was, who was pitching and who was at bat, when the news broke.  These memories are impossible.  John Kennedy was assassinated in November, and the US baseball season ends in October.  No one was listening to a baseball game at the time the news broke.  The narrative is false.

The interpretations that we assign to the events of our lives emerge from a variety of sources -- our parents, our schooling, our friends, our culture, our tribe.  Mostly they serve to buttress our sense of who we are.

A powerful mind is able to step out of the interpretations and see them for what they are:  fictions created by defense mechanisms.  

Ask yourself:  how reliable a narrator am I of my my own life story?