What sort of advantages are there to using an unreliable narrator?
Tatiana’s unmooring is, yes, a consequence of some kind of mental instability but it is also very much a product of her solitude and alienation. The sighting on the U-Bahn in the opening scene leaves an imprint and though she tries to distance herself from it, the image resurfaces under different guises. The other two characters, Doktor Weiss and Jonas the meteorologist, are also seen entirely through her eyes. Whatever we know about them is via her own perceptions, and these are based on speculation and her own strange deductive logic. Because I wished to leave much of what happens in the book within the realm of ambiguity, I created a character whose thought processes embodied a similar kind of spillage between fantasy and reality. An unreliable narrator immediately creates a detachment from all that is witnessed. It also introduces an element of dramatic irony which I felt was very necessary for this story. There have been one or two cranky, short-sighted critics who find issue with
