The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, 1887
The magic trick:
An unreliable narrator who might be, in fact, more reliable than we initially thought
Today’s story is an excellent example of the unreliable narrator.
Some unreliable narrators are used to surprise the reader. We believe them at the start. Why wouldn’t we? They’re telling us a story. Why would they lie to us? But maybe doubt begins to set in as the story progresses. Or perhaps there is a stunning plot twist at the end, where we realize all at once that our narrator has been deceiving us all along.
This is not that. Our narrator in “The Horla” strikes us as a bit off from the very first page. He says as much. The entire story is his own journey to sort out whether or not he is losing his mind.
OK, so what kind of unreliable narration is it then?
It’s the kind – and certainly Poe would be proud of his influence here – where the narrator employs just enough intellect or logic to make the reader think that ok, they might have a point here.
Total insanity isn’t scary or interesting. But if someone appears to be just three-quarters mad? It’s terrifying.
Here, the reader doesn’t begin to doubt the narrator’s reliability as the story progresses. We begin to doubt the narrator’s unreliability. Which, really, is a far more unsettling process.
And that’s quite a trick on Maupassant’s part.
The selection:
“Professor Don Pedro Henriques, accompanied by several medical savants, has gone to the Province of San-Paulo, in order to study the origin and the manifestations of this surprising madness on the spot, and to propose such measures to the Emperor as may appear to him to be most fitted to restore the mad population to reason.”
Ah! Ah! I remember now that fine Brazilian three-master which passed in front of my windows as it was going up the Seine, on the eighth of last May! I thought it looked so pretty, so white and bright! That Being was on board of her, coming from there, where its race sprang from. And it saw me! It saw my house, which was also white, and He sprang from the ship on to the land. Oh! Good heavens!
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