Unreliable Narrators in Adventure Fiction

The most common opening move in classic adventure fiction is a confession of bad sourcing.

I have been keeping a commonplace book of first sentences, and a pattern emerged that I didn’t expect. Again and again, the adventure novels of a century ago begin not with a shipwreck or a gunshot but with a disclosure problem. The narrator has heard something they shouldn’t have, from someone who shouldn’t have told them, and they are about to pass it on anyway. The purest specimen I know is the opening of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first Tarzan novel, from 1912:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.

Read as information, the sentence is a catastrophe. The source is compromised (drunk), the transmission improper (no business telling it), the receiver hostile (skeptical incredulity). Any newspaper editor would kill the story on the spot. And yet as an opening, it works — reliably, across a whole genre. This essay is about why, and about what the same device is doing today in places far from fiction.

The value of the improper source

Part of the answer is simple social physics: we assign secrets a higher value than announcements. A story that had to leak is presumed to be worth leaking. The frame narrator of this school never says here is a tale I invented for your amusement — he says I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, and the gossip instinct does the rest.

But there is a subtler mechanism underneath, and Burroughs, nobody’s idea of a subtle writer, deploys it with real care. Watch what the next paragraphs of that opening do. The tipsy narrator, stung by his listener’s doubt, produces documents — “musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office.” The teller’s pride, not the listener’s request, summons the evidence. Then comes the hedge to end all hedges:

I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true.

This is magnificent nonsense. The narrator offers his own act of concealment — I changed the names — as evidence of the story’s truth. The logic is circular, self-serving, and completely persuasive at reading speed. Most readers swallow it whole on a first pass; it takes a slow second reading to see the card being palmed.

A genealogy of the frame narrative

Once you start looking, the device is everywhere in the nineteenth century, and older than that. Frankenstein arrives as letters from an Arctic sea captain to his sister, relaying a stranger’s deathbed narrative, which itself contains the creature’s narrative — three envelopes deep. Wuthering Heights filters its whole gothic storm through Lockwood, a dim tenant, transcribing the housekeeper Nelly Dean, who was there for some of it and heard about the rest. The Turn of the Screw opens at a fireside with a manuscript that must be sent for, its provenance lovingly established before a word of it is read. Poe found a manuscript in a bottle. Conrad put Marlow on a yawl in the Thames and let him talk until dark.

The realist novel was, at the same moment, perfecting the opposite technology: the omniscient narrator, who knows everything and owes you no explanation of how. Set the two side by side and the frame tale looks like a step backward — all that scaffolding, all those excuses. Why would writers of adventure, of all genres, saddle their openings with chains of custody?

The standard answer is insecurity: fantastic material overcompensating with paperwork. Apes raising an English lord; a monster assembled from grave-parts — best to lash the balloon to something before inflating it. That is surely part of it. The wilder the cargo, the more elaborate the customs declaration. But it is not the main thing.

What the frame actually delivers

The frame’s true payload isn’t credibility. It’s company.

An omniscient narrator gives you the story, but a frame narrator gives you a scene of storytelling — the wine, the fireside, the reluctant teller, the listener leaning in. Before anything has happened, you have been seated. You are not reading an account; you are overhearing one, and overhearing is warmer. The frame recreates, inside the cold technology of print, the oldest media environment we have: somebody talking, somebody listening, night outside.

This explains a detail that pure-credibility theories can’t. The frame narrators of these books are always slightly bad at their jobs — doubtful, unqualified, admittedly working from patched-together sources. Burroughs’s narrator says outright that he “painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies.” Lockwood misunderstands half of what he is told. If the point were authority, you would hire a better witness. The point is intimacy, and intimacy runs on flaws. A too-perfect source is a press release. A compromised one is a friend.

There is a bookkeeping pleasure too. The frame gives the reader a job: track the joints, mind the gaps, remember that this paragraph is the captain quoting the doctor quoting the diary. It flatters us into the role of investigator. Detective fiction, invented in the same decades, is arguably just the frame tale with the reader’s job description finally printed on the cover.

The disclaimer as invitation

Return to that opening sentence, because it hides a small master class in how belief actually works.

“I do not say the story is true.” No reader ever puts the book down at that line. The disclaimer doesn’t lower the stakes; it transfers them. The author has stopped vouching, which means someone must decide how much of this to believe, and the someone is you. Skepticism, invited in the front door, stops battering at the windows. Meanwhile the narrator’s stray concessive clauses — the yellowed diary, the dovetailing records, the changed names — keep sliding evidence across the table, item by item, each one deniable, none of it sworn to.

Stage magicians call this giving the audience the wrong thing to check. The frame tale does it honestly, in plain sight, which is why it doesn’t feel like fraud. It feels like a game whose rules everyone knows. The novelist says: I heard this from a drunk man, and here are some documents. The reader says: go on. Both parties understand that “it MAY be true” is not an epistemic claim but a door held open.

The device today

The improper source has not gone anywhere. It runs half the internet. A friend at the company told me. Screenshot from a private channel. Deleted post, archived here. I probably shouldn’t share this. The forwarded thread with its provenance mumbled — this is Burroughs’s opening, minus the craft and the candor. The old frame tale confessed its unreliability as an invitation to a game. Its descendants confess nothing; the leak-shaped opening is now a costume worn by claims that very much want to be believed straight.

Which is the best argument for rereading the pulps with adult eyes. They are a vaccine made from a live virus: all the machinery of seductive hearsay, running in a sandbox where the stakes are apes and lost heirs. Learn to feel the palmed card there — the concealment offered as evidence, the flaw deployed as charm — and you will recognize the same move the next time a stranger’s screenshot arrives already glowing with the promise of the improperly told. The frame survives the cargo; the reader’s job is to notice which one they are being sold.