The Unreliable Narrator

We humans love a good story. A made-up tale, not true, but gripping, emotional, frightening, entertaining. We have different genres- horror, thriller, romance, sci-fi, dystopian, murder mystery, detective. We have people who act out these stories, we film them, we pay them lots of money to watch them pretending to be other people.
We have revered for centuries, indeed millennia, many who have made up these stories.- Shakespeare, Homer, Hesiod. The stories are still performed and quoted from. Many have fantastic creatures- part man, part god, part animal. The Epic of Gilgamesh is often reckoned to be the oldest story – 4000 years ago, set in Uruk, Babylon, now modern-day Iraq. It contains many elements that echo through the millennia – fear, love, gods, good and evil, immortality. These elements are re-used over and over in stories, films, plays, theology, right up to the present day.

Many ancient stories are still believed to be real. Many crop up in modified forms in widely different cultures. Some could be based on real events – like the flood. It crops up in Mesopotamian stories, Native American oral history, Christianity, Hinduism and Greek mythology. The boundaries between reality and mythology become blurred, especially in religious writings and beliefs. Hence the term, unreliable narrator. I imagine groups of old men, sat around, telling each other increasingly more exaggerated stories, stories to frighten, stories to gain power and influence within their hierarchy.

This unreliability regarding what we are told begins early on in our lives – the tooth fairy, Father Christmas- from those we trust the most- our parents. It continues in school with religious instruction and mass celebration of unlikely things and events – the virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, a vengeful God killing his only child, heaven and hell, reincarnation, karma, a Supreme Being, the sacredness of cows, messengers of God and prophets. Strange rituals to please that God-fasting, prayer, pilgrimage, pretend eating and drinking the Holy blood and body, and kissing a 2000 year old temple wall.
That unreliable narration continues into adulthood and the internet has made it much worse – conspiracy theories, scams. What and who to believe ? Scientists ? Scientists who tell us the whole Universe came into being very much as The Bible says – in a flash, from nothing. That light is a particle and a wave and that particle has no mass. That black holes won’t let light escape because of massive gravitational forces – but gravity requires an object to have mass to influence it.

That gravity comes from the distortion of spacetime, that the fabric of space becomes messed up, but also that there is no fabric. That there’s invisible, mysterious forces at work (religion again) called dark matter and indeed dark energy which no one has ever seen or detected, that the Universe in on a membrane, that there are countless universes. That time is not constant but they know exactly how old the Universe is, and when elements began to form to the nearest nanosecond.

Plotting one’s way through all this to get at some truth, passed all these unreliable narrators, is nigh on impossible. They are everywhere.