2: The Secret of the Unreliable Narrator

Most people assume every lyric in The Life of a Showgirl is Taylor Swift speaking directly, giving her perspective—but what if they're not?

Understanding the secret of the unreliable narrator changes everything about how we read this album—especially the opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia.” Once you recognize when and how the narrator shifts, a whole new layer of meaning comes into focus.

In this episode, we’ll explore what the different between author and narrator + the concept of an unreliable narrator—and why it might just be the key to unlocking the entire album. 

Stick around for a the writing prompts at the end to help you try the technique yourself!

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It's not too late to snag the replay for Write Like Taylor Swift: a 90-minute immersive workshop to help you apply Taylor's most powerful techniques to whatever you already write.

Get all the LIT112 writing prompts in one place: www.maraeller.com/prompts.

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Transcript

Speaker 1:18

Welcome to Lit 112, the Life of a Showgirl, where we treat Taylor Swift's latest album like a novel, peeling back the layers of meaning, from Shakespearean allusions to character arcs and auditory techniques. I'm your host, Mara Eller, a literature and writing teacher with 16 years of experience at the high school and college level. I just retired to focus on editing and book coaching, but when I started getting requests for this series on social media, I couldn't resist. Whether you're a veteran swiftie or just an AP lit nerd like me who happens to like her music, all are welcome here. I've even got something for you writers: creative prompts inspired by the subject of each lesson. You can find them at the end of the episodes. So grab your metaphorical notebook and let's unpack this record together, chapter by chapter, song by song.

Speaker 2:08

Today we are talking about narrator versus author and why does that matter? Of course, by author we also mean writer of lyrics. So in my previous video I talked about how I see this album as a concept album functioning as a whole, telling a cohesive story. Of course, there's a lot more filling in the gaps that we have to do as readers with a concept album like this than we would have to do with a typical novel because we don't have any of that connective tissue between the songs. We have 12 songs and that's it. But one day if there's a musical, we might have some of that and I will be pretty excited.

Speaker 2:48

Okay, so narrator versus author slash writer. There's a difference there, and I think not recognizing that is a big problem, a big reason that people are missing what's really going on with this album. When you're reading a piece of fiction, there's a voice in the text that is telling the story, and let's just keep it simple. For now and look at a first person narrator using I, me mine. So I went to the moon and had an adventure. Okay, so I, in that sentence, that would be the narrator. The narrator is the person telling the story. You can also have a main character who's not a narrator, or you might have the narrator being the main character. So for example, the Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. So the narrator is Nick, the main character is Gatsby. But it's told in a first person by Nick, you know, I met Gatsby at his house, et cetera. Okay. So we have a narrator, but that is not the same thing as the author or writer. Fitzgerald is not Nick. A lot of times those two can get conflated because maybe you have a novel or a work of literature or music that is very autobiographical. So this fictional story mirrors the writer's own lived experience pretty closely, and that line can get really blurry. Other times, maybe you have a male author who's writing from the perspective of a female narrator, just as one example. You know, other times that distinction is a little more obvious.

Speaker 4:26

And I think what's made it harder for people to recognize this distinction or remember it in this album is that Taylor Swift has, for her whole career, largely written songs that are very diaristic. It's almost like you're reading her diary entries that she's polished up and turned into poetry and set to music, and that's wonderful. We love it. You know, Dead Poets Society is, which I always wanna call it, Tortured Poets Department, is very much like that a lot of her albums are from that first person perspective and are potentially not even fiction, right? Maybe they are literally about her life. So memoir would be what we'd call that in literature. But not all of her songs are that way. Folklore is a great example of an album where she had a lot of songs that were not her story. In fact, she had one that played with that distinction, the Last Great American Dynasty. So she's telling a story about this woman who married into money and then her husband died and everyone hates her and she dyes the neighbor's dog key lime green. And then at the end, in one of Taylor's classic little surprise flips for the last verse, she says her house was empty by the sea until it was purchased by me. She comes into the story. So we find out, oh, all along she has been the narrator, but she was not the main character. So I think it's really important to keep that clear.

Speaker 5:56

I'm trying to think of another maybe exile or um, illicit affairs. I don't know if that's from Taylor's lived experience, doesn't necessarily strike me as being from her lived experience, but, I think illicit affairs could very well be a great example of where the narrator, the person telling this story of that song, is not meant to be her. She wrote about it, but it is not her lived experience. It's not necessarily what she believes about the situation, which brings me to the next distinction that I want to make.

Speaker 6:32

And that is that the narrator is not always articulating what the writer or author actually believes about a subject. This is known as the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is a really delightful technique in literature that allows an author to play with different viewpoints. So like Mark Twain, um, Huckleberry Finn is the classic unreliable narrator. I know it's a controversial banned book, uh, but he spends, that is, Huck Finn spends the whole book articulating views that are the opposite of what Mark Twain actually believes in order to point out in this case, you know how ridiculous those views are, providing sort of a satire, which is when you're mocking something in order to make a social commentary. So, that's another thing I want you to keep in mind for this album. Just because the narrator says something or believes something in this album doesn't mean that the narrator is interpreting things correctly or that Taylor Swift as the author supports those views or believes those things to be true.

Speaker 7:46

Hopefully, maybe you can already start to see where this is gonna go, but I think this is super important particularly for the first track, the Fate of Ophelia. This is a young, naive girl. She's swept up in this almost romance of success and fame and, I see it not just as a love story, but also as or more so really as a story of her showbiz romance, rising to success. So I want you to listen to that song again and think about which parts of what she's saying might actually be naive perspectives that we are meant to question. We'll pick up with the Fate of Ophelia in our next video.

Speaker 8:32

I'd love to hear your thoughts, follow along and, tell me what comes up for you when you think about these topics. And I'm gonna start providing you with writing prompts to go with each of our lessons. So if you're a writer, these are for you.

Speaker 8:47

If you're a fiction writer, your prompt is, how could you take one of your fictional characters, or you can come up with one, and write a scene or just a page or two or something where you have this person relating the events or relating the meaning of the events in a way that's actually not what you think is true. See if you can play with that device of having an unreliable narrator.

Speaker 9:13

And if you are a memoir writer, then you're writing about your own life, nonfiction. And I'll just add, if you're doing prescriptive nonfiction, like a self-help book, those have tons of personal stories in them, and a lot of times an important part of self-help is recognizing the lies that we've believed or the misconceptions that we've had. So try to pick a time in your life when you believed something that ended up not being true, something where you learned, in your wisdom as a more mature person, to question what you had thought. How could you go into the mind of that previous version of you and write what you thought at the time as if it were true? And then of course later you can play with it and point out that that was not actually correct.

Speaker 10:00

I'd love to see anything that you come up with, hear if those prompts are fruitful. And until next time, keep your mind open, turn up the music loud, and have fun with it!

Speaker 10:11

That's it for today's class. If you're loving these deep dives, make sure to follow the podcast or come join the discussion on social media. My links are in the show notes. I'd love to hear your questions, comments, and insights. Class is always about bringing you into the conversation, helping you to do your own thinking and come to your own conclusions, so I'd love to see you involved. Until next time, class dismissed.