Anyone who knows me, knows I love an unreliable narrator. I love the idea that we can't just trust that what the character whose head we're in thinks.
But it's really a fine line between an unreliable narrator and an unlikeable narrator. I had that featured front and center recently as I read "The Magicians. As always, there may be spoilers under the cut!
Quentin, our main narrator in "The Magicians," started out pretty interesting to me. He was a super smart teenager, feeling restless and left behind by life, unable to find his place or anything to hold his interest. But as time went forward, that's sort of where he stayed. If anything, he sharpened and solidified his inward focus, to the point it made me impatient with the whole thing. He only cared about his own feelings and his own wants, but even there it was the carnal wants. He never found a wider purpose to his life.
Now, this could make for an interesting story. I sort of get that this utter failure of Quentin in personality and focus was part of the point. He never tries to find a purpose for himself, just as Alice warns, and as a result he's perpetually listless. He's a hyper-achiever when he's given a solid thing to work for, and I find it funny that the one thing he canonically decided to focus on of his own volition is something that keeps cropping back up, time and time again.
But if I can get all of this on an intellectual level, I also can't deny that for me at least, it didn't work. Whatever message he was trying to impart with his story, it didn't reach me. Quentin seemed no better a person at the end of the story, to me, than he was at the start. the losses through the book were great, but I never felt bad for *him* over them.
And I guess, in the end, that's the divider. An unreliable narrator doesn't have to be even a good person, but there has to be some reason to cheer for them, or at least want to see them successful on some level. This one just didn't do that for me.
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