Liar & Spy

An unreliable narrator is one whose storytelling is untrustworthy. They may deliberately deceive the reader, or they may be unintentionally inaccurate, but either way, the reader learns to question the narrator’s credibility and to read their descriptions with a healthy dose of skepticism. Georges fulfills this role in his tendency to obfuscate the truth of his mother’s hospitalization throughout his narrative descriptions of his daily life. Throughout the majority of the novel, Georges pretends as though his mother is simply working a lot of extra shifts at the hospital rather than being a patient there. Similarly, he presents the Scrabble notes as being from his mother without acknowledging the fact that she hasn’t been present to arrange them herself, and that Georges’s father is therefore arranging them on her behalf. Thus, Georges obscures the reality of his mother’s illness by focusing instead on other plausible reasons for why his mother might be away from home for usually long stretches of time.

Georges’s mother’s job as a nurse allows the author to continue this façade throughout most of the book, as Georges can simply think of his mother as being at the hospital without distinguishing this as being an unusual occurrence in their daily lives. However, the middle section of the book begins to undermine Georges’s selective descriptions in a number of ways. For example, when Georges’s father reports that Sara is “a trouper […] amazing […] [r]eally strong” (107), this description does not dovetail with the perception of her as a hospital employee, for such wording more aptly applies to a patient’s progress in recovery from an illness. This, along with his taking Georges’s mother’s robe and favorite snacks with him to the hospital, suggest that Georges’s version of events may not be reliable.