This post contains spoilers for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. If you wish to remain unspoiled, you should probably bail out now since you’ll probably be able to guess some amount of them by the time you get to the point below where the spoilers are (there’s text in all caps to let you know). That said, I kind of hop on that particular point somewhat tangentially, so it’s entirely possible that you can read this whole post minus the paragraph with the spoilers and still not figure anything out. Knowing the game and what these spoilers are, though, I wouldn’t risk it.
I’ve been thinking about unreliable narrators a lot, lately. Well, lately and stretching back pretty much all of this year, honestly. It all started with reading the Animorphs, a practice I unfortunately fell off of back in May or June when my phone stopped connecting to my exercise bike and I had to use my tablet instead, preventing me from reading while I got my daily cardio. There’s a lot of first-person narration there with a certain amount of admitted unreliability. Not because the narrators are attempting to lie to us, the readers, but because they’re (admittedly, even) telling a story from their limited perspective and giving us their read on things rather than suggesting that they learned the truth of things after the fact and are sharing that with us in the “present” the narrator inhabits (though there are occasionally some asides, they usually only reflect the later events of that particular book). Unreliable narrators are also showing up a lot in US politics and and culture, though I’d say there’s a lot more people deliberately misleading us rather than admitting to the fact that their view points might be limited. It behooves a lot of people in positions of power or potential power to have the masses trust them unconditionally and they’re deliberately leading people so far afield that I’m not sure I can say we live in the same reality anymore. And then, philosophically, we’re all somewhat unreliable narrators in our own lives as we form opinions and beliefs about our interactions in the world that don’t necessarily reflect the truth of things. After all, maybe people don’t hate us or aren’t ignoring us, they’re just busy or tired or any number of other things that might divert someone’s attention or make them somewhat unresponsive. Unreliable narrators abound in life, culture, ourselves, politics, and everywhere else, honestly.
Part of the problem I’ve been thinking about, though, as I’ve turned this idea over in my head all year, is that most people maybe aren’t entirely sure where to draw the lines around when someone is an unreliable narrator and when some is, say, a liar. After all, it’s so incredibly easy to conflate the two things that they might as well be interchangeable words! Far be it from me to tell people how to use language. I’m a firm descriptivist after all, not a prescriptivist (essentially, I’m not going to give anyone shit for saying things “weirdly” or “incorrectly” since I believe that we shouldn’t force rules about language on people but describe how people use language). But there’s a time in any discussion where I will set my wide acceptance aside and get a little pedantic: sometimes, as I’ve seen more and more, the distinction about what we mean matters. It’s not necessarily just language evolving so much as someone misunderstanding and using a phrase or term incorrectly. I’m not going to tell them they’re wrong to use that term or phrase, I’ve just going to jump into analytical battle against the point they’re making. So long as I believe it’s wrong, care enough to spend the energy, and think there’s actually a useful conversation to be had (which means I’m not arguing with any right-wingers, centrists, both-sides-ers, or trolls).
Generally speaking, an unreliable narrator is someone who is presenting the “truth” of events that we, as an outside participant in whatever narrative is being developed, have a reason to believe is actually incorrect. For example, in the novel version of American Psycho, even the narrator seems to distrust his own account of the events he’s relaying. In Fight Club, we see a narrator who we slowly learn to question as the book goes on and events unfold, even if he never actually says anything that suggests he thinks he can’t be relied on. At the far end of the spectrum, we have a narrator like Nick Caraway who ensures us he is trustworthy, but the things he’s saying and the events that unfold in The Great Gatsby give us reason to doubt his veracity, or at the very least question his honesty. Unreliable narrators are not people who simply lie to us. They’re people that are charged with relaying a story to us, who are our only viewpoints into a series of unfolding events–a story–and who we should not take at face value. No part of that has anything to do with their active intention to mislead us. Liars are unreliable narrators, yes, but not all unreliable narrators are liars. When it comes to figuring out which is which, it can be a fine but incredibly important hair to split.
Since I’ve played a lot of Dragon Age lately, the easiest example that springs to mind is Dragon Age 2 and Varric (also, one of my friends showed me a tiktok video that attempted to lay a lot of the blame for the events of early Veilguard at Varric’s feet by casting him as an unreliable narrator and the argument supporting that assertion was so flimsy and flat-out wrong about the games I’d just played through that I spent an hour arguing with that video in my friends’ DMs while they were forced to be my audience). It is well-established in Dragon Age 2 that Varric is a smooth-talker, a bit of an opportunist, an embellisher of tales, an avid storyteller, and the person relaying the details that encompass all of Dragon Age 2. His reputation is not helped by the way the game starts, with your main character, Hawke, blowing away hordes of Darkspawn as they valiantly hold their own like the Champion of Kirkwall they’d eventually become, only to be knocked out this story by the woman interrogating him who knows he is lying. After that, though, he sticks to the truth with the exception of one bit of personal information where he attempts to skin a heroic, adventurous tale rather than share the painful reality. He lies sometimes, he embellishes, and he even makes things up, but he’s a reliable narrator for one very simple reason. We, the players, drive the story, not him.
The whole damn video game is as real or as fake as the story Varric is telling Cassandra in the parts of the framing narrative separating the acts of the game. There’s no separating the two. Whatever we did as we controlled Hawke is what Varric relayed to Cassandra and, as we see reinforced via the choices carried forward into Dragon Age: Inquisition, the truth of the matter. If we are to doubt Varric’s retelling because he tried to brush off someone interrogating him or because it is eventually revealed that he lied to keep his friend safe, then we might as well not play the game. None of it happened, after all, unless we buy in! Sure, you could pick at parts of the game like the sudden, extreme, and completely unchangeable actions of Anders at the end of the third act, and argue that things are being hidden from us by the storyteller (Varric) rather than the storyteller (the game’s writers), but Varric has no reason to lie in those circumstances because everyone already knows what Anders did and the storytellers don’t do any of the work to hide or hint at what is going to eventually happen that might suggest that they were trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
(SPOILERS FOR DRAGON AGE: THE VEILGUARD BELOW THIS!)
That said, while it feels like more of a twist than an unreliable narrator, the fact that the major twist of Dragon Age: The Veilguard is reliant on someone believing something untrue and acting at all times as if it were true while being our point of access to the entire narrative means that Rook is technically an unreliable narrator. As the end of Act 2 reveals to us, Varric died in the prologue, during the initial encounter with Solas (the dagger went DEEP and Varric, that beloved, avuncular fellow, isn’t tough enough to walk that off), and yet Rook kept seeing him because Solas messed with them. There’s hints at the truth of things, scattered all throughout the game, meaning that we, outside the game, can come to realize that maybe Rook–our view point, camera, and mode of interaction into the game–isn’t actually seeing everything going on around them. If Varric was a work of fiction wrought by Solas in an attempt to manipulate us, what else that we saw and were supposed to think was real was also a fabrication? Not much, of course, since that would completely destroy the playability of the video game, but it is really an interesting case of a player-controlled video game protagonist being an unreliable narrator. You don’t get many of those since they’re difficult to pull off. Most people would get really frustrated and probably not wish to continue playing if they discovered that the stuff they’d been doing was actually not what they thought without some kind of hint that there was something going on.
(THE SPOILERS ARE DONE NOW! YOU CAN RESUME READING!)
It takes a bit of practice, to be able to spot an unreliable narrator when it seems like they’re just lying. In most cases, it doesn’t really matter, after all. Most people we encounter outside of stories are just liars, exaggerators, or storytellers since it’s difficult to only get one look into an event. That said, given some of the stuff going on in society, there’s probably a few public figures you can assume are just unreliable narrators, regardless of their intentions. Such as cops. CEOs and politicians might just be liars rather than unreliable narrators (since the “unreliable” part suggests they’re accurate some of the time and I’ve barely even heard of a politician or CEO that could claim as little as a “some of the time” degree of accuracy. I’ve actually come up empty on who else might be unreliable narrators other than cops and cop-adjacent “authority figures” Anyway, I’m starting to get a little circular here, so I’m going to wrap it up by saying that maybe you should learn how to tell when someone is an unreliable narrator, when they’re a liar, and why Varric can’t be an unreliable narrator since we’re the ones driving his narration as the players of the game.