Here’s a true/false question from my midterm exam in introductory literature: “The use of first-person narration means that there can only be one character in a story.” The answer is, of course, false, an easy question for anyone who paid attention in class.
A first-person narrator conveys a literary work through the pronouns I/me or we/us. For example, I write my columns in the first person. I combine my experiences with current events in a kind of “American first-person narration style” and write personal essays about the public problems of our country.
Another contemporary author who writes in the first person is Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance. His 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was promoted as an insider’s account of life in Appalachia.
Having grown up on a small farm in the Appalachian region of southern Pennsylvania, I had high hopes for Hillbilly Elegy. But I quickly realized that Vance wrote in a particular literary voice known as the “unreliable narrator.” Vance spent some summers with relatives in Kentucky, but he actually grew up in a part of Ohio that is considered the Midwest, not Appalachia. Many critics have rightly called him a “fake hillbilly.”
I quickly realized that Vance’s book was primarily focused on belittling the people around him. “Self-absorbed,” we would say where I grew up. A better title might have been “Hillbilly Portrait,” since he burned his friends and relatives and portrayed these American workers as lazy. I know from my Appalachian upbringing that we are hard-working people who were too often crushed by the trickle-down economics of Regan and Bush that Vance supports.
Vance also claims that Appalachians hated Barack Obama because they envied him. Vance is not old enough to remember that the Appalachian generation before him generally neither hated nor envied national figures who were different from themselves. My parents, for example, admired and respected John Kennedy and Walter Cronkite.
Back then, there were no now-widespread right-wing media outlets to tell my parents to brand Kennedy anti-American or to consider Cronkite fake news. During Vance’s childhood, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and countless others dishonestly told Americans that Obama was a foreigner, a socialist, and anti-American. The people of Vance’s Appalachian region disliked Obama because they had been taught by unreliable narrators that such dislike was their patriotic duty as true Americans.
The same right-wing media is now telling people in Appalachia that real Americans must hate Kamala Harris and idolize Donald Trump. Of course, Vance was recently a “Never Trumper,” speculating that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” But he saw that no Republican could counter the MAGA machine, so now he’s just another obsequious Trump worshiper.
Vance is the latest in a long line of unreliable narrators among conservative politicians: Joe McCarthy’s McCarthyism, George Wallace’s racism, Richard Nixon’s criminal behavior, Ronald Reagan’s “government is the enemy” mantra, Newt Gingrich’s demonization of the Democrats, and Trump’s blending of all these unreliable narratives into a toxic mixture of paranoia, outrage, and scapegoating.
Vance’s specific brand of outrage is to disparage people without biological children as if they aren’t committed to the future of America. He has called people without children “psychotic,” “sociopathic,” and “childless cat ladies” (what misogyny?), and said they should have fewer voting rights. Of course, he’s targeting top Democratic politicians like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. But Harris is a stepmom, and Buttigieg has adopted children. Does Vance think they love their children less than other parents love their biological children? Can he really be so narrow-minded and lacking in empathy? I’m a stepmom and a stepgrandmother, so I’d have some stern Appalachian curse words ready for JD if we ever met behind the barn.
Vance, a Republican who supposedly represents family-oriented values, does not support paid family leave, sick leave, or extending the child tax credit. In contrast, Democrats (with and without children) want to create a better world for Vance’s children than the one their father envisions for everyone else.
Unreliable narrators seek to create “naive narrators”: regular people who spread right-wing lies without fact-checking them. They encourage a form of trickle-down dishonesty in which the richly paid unreliable narrators of Fox News and Trumpworld get countless naive narrators to spread these lies for free on social media.
Unreliable narrators will try to convince us of many falsehoods this election season: Kamala Harris is unqualified (and somehow not really black!), inflation is Biden’s fault, tax cuts for the rich help everyone, Trump knows nothing about Project 2025, God saved Trump from a liberal assassination attempt, Democrats are killing babies, immigrants are invading, elections are stolen, authoritarianism strengthens freedom, guns protect people, Trump’s convictions/impeachments are persecution, the Olympics made a mockery of Christianity, and on and on. We must not allow their lies to turn us into naive narrators.
In class, we don’t learn about literature as an abstract concept with no connection to reality. Literature is about real life. If we develop critical thinking skills to spot unreliable narrators in literature, we also have a better chance of spotting those liars in politics and the media.
I am pleased that the vast majority of students answered this exam question correctly. I hope we all do just as well in the upcoming election. After all, there is much more at stake in November than just a single question on a relatively inconsequential exam. Please choose our country’s editor-in-chief wisely.
John Sheirer’s new book, First-Person American: Personal Essays About Our Nation’s Public Issues, includes a summary of his columns for the Gazette from October 2020 to the present.
