Mythcreants has long been on a quest to rid the world of meta mysteries – the trope where audiences are made to wonder what the protagonist knows – even before Chris published an in-depth article on it. We always knew this would be an uphill battle, as authors love this trope. Today I’ve set my sights on Brandon Sanderson’s 383,389-word doorstopper, The Way of Kings (WoK). Of the four POV characters, three are steeped in meta mysteries and the fourth is so minor that he barely matters.* Is this a problem? I’ll let you decide… but the answer is yes.
The Narration Is Contrived
The first problem WoK encounters with its meta mysteries is the way they clash with its narration style. The book is written in close limited, meaning that the POV character’s thoughts effectively are the narration. The POV character changes depending on the scene or chapter, but Sanderson always sticks to his chosen character for a given section.
This is an excellent narration style and one we often recommend. It immerses readers in the story by putting them in the protagonist’s shoes, which is great for building both tension and attachment. But as a side effect, close limited also creates the expectation that readers will see the protagonist’s important thoughts as they happen. If the POV character sees a snarling wolf, readers expect to know it. If the character thinks about their departed loved ones, that should be on the page.
This doesn’t work with meta mysteries, since the protagonist already knows the answer. If that information were added to the narration like the character’s other important thoughts, it would give away the mystery. Instead, authors create weird breaks where the character’s train of thought is suddenly absent before starting up again.
All three characters have this problem. We’re supposed to wonder how Kaladin became a slave, so when people ask him about him about it, he somehow changes the subject inside his own mind. Something mysterious happened to Dalinar’s wife, but his thoughts always jump over that and consider troop deployments instead. When the death of Shallan’s father comes up, she literally thinks, “Don’t think about that,” and then the narration moves on. Because, as we all know, trying not to think about something is a great way to avoid thinking about it.*
These deliberate omissions leave us feeling like the characters are deliberately hiding information from us, as if they know this is a book that we’re reading. Alternatively, it can feel like the author is reaching out and sectioning off certain information for later. Either way, it’s a frustrating experience. Just let us enjoy the story!
The Story Is Confusing
By definition, a meta mystery requires withholding information from the reader. Sometimes, the information is so important that without it, we can’t figure out what’s going on. When we first see Kaladin, he’s commanding soldiers in a battle, being a total badass. There’s no indication of anything going wrong or even that the battle is close to ending.
The next time we see Kaladin, it’s eight months later and he’s a slave. This is really disorienting, and the book does nothing to help us understand how we got here. It can’t, you see, because how Kaladin became a slave is one of his many meta mysteries. The closest it gives us to an explanation is when a minor villain calls Kaladin a “deserter,” but it’s obvious from Kaladin’s internal thoughts that he isn’t one.
Eventually, you can figure out that WoK has thrown a meta mystery your way and that you’ll probably get an explanation later. But in the moment, it leaves you scrambling back to Kaladin’s previous section, thinking you might have missed something. Something similar happens with Dalinar, when the narration casually mentions he can’t remember anything about his wife. Wait, what? How could he forget his wife? Once again, you’re left to scan through previous pages* to make sure you didn’t miss something, since that’s the kind of thing a story would usually explain.
Of all the feelings that storytellers want to instill in readers, confusion isn’t even on the list. It’s probably the worst experience a reader can get, with boredom being the only close competitor. In fact, the two are closely linked! If a story is confusing, readers often get bored because it’s hard to get invested if you don’t know what’s happening.
Plot Holes Are Obscured
A common problem with reveals is that once they’re made, a character’s previous actions no longer make sense. Why was the villain destroying everyone’s mana crystals if their secret evil plan was to harness everyone’s mana crystals? While inconsistencies can happen anywhere, this type is especially pervasive because it’s easy for storytellers to ignore that a character is acting against their own goals when those goals are still a secret.
The good news is that in a closely narrated story, protagonists don’t usually have this problem. Their motivation should be clear from the first page, so authors are less likely to make this mistake. If nothing else, it’ll get pointed out sooner or later in beta reading. That is, unless the story has a meta mystery.
For most of the book, Shallan’s big motivation is to get money for her family. They’re so badly in debt that they’ll likely be killed if they can’t pay it back, so she concocts a dangerous plan to steal a valuable magic artifact. Her family will have it even worse if she’s caught, but that’s how desperate they are.
The problem is that Shallan’s story also contains numerous hints that she possesses something called a Shardblade: an incredibly rare and powerful weapon. These blades are so sought after that powerful nobles will often trade entire cities to acquire them. So… why not try selling the Shardblade? Seems like it would be less risky than the plan Shallan actually goes with.
This issue isn’t impossible to explain,* but without any acknowledgment in the story, it feels like a mistake. Sanderson is normally pretty good at avoiding plot goofs like this, and it really seems like he didn’t realize there was a problem in this case because technically, the narration never explicitly states that Shallan has a shardblade.
Characters Can’t Be Understood
To invest in a character’s journey, readers need to understand them. That’s how attachment forms, and it’s an area where prose stories have a big advantage over movies and TV. Visual stories have to rely on things like dialogue, background music, and an actor’s performance to bring across who a character is, while novels can simply use narration to convey that information in real time.
A meta mystery takes that advantage and tosses it out the window, something Sanderson does with all three of WoK’s important POV characters, though some have it worse than others. Kaladin actually gets off relatively easy here: at one point, he bitterly disputes the idea that aristocrats will actually let a commoner keep a Shardblade that’s won on the battlefield. This would mean a lot more if we knew that Kaladin once tried to do that very thing and was severely punished for it. We can’t know that though, ’cause Sanderson is saving it for a “reveal.”
Dalinar’s main issue is the confusion surrounding why he can’t remember his wife. Eventually, it’s revealed that he knows why this happened: a curse was put on him by something called the Nightwatcher. That only raises more questions, though. Was this done to Dalinar against his will or as part of a trade? If a trade, did Dalinar know the price he’d be paying? And what did he get out of it? These are fundamental questions about what kind of person Dalinar is, but despite his character arc being super important for about a third of the book, they mostly go unanswered.
Shallan has it even worse. At the beginning of the story, we’re told that her father has recently died, which is part of why the family finances are in such bad shape. For the rest of the book, we’re given occasional hints that there’s something unusual about the death, but that’s it. Then, near the end, it’s revealed that Shallan actually killed her father. Huh. Shallan really doesn’t seem like a person who recently took her own father’s life. She mostly seems upset at the theft she’s planning to commit, not at a months-old patricide.
Of course, maybe she’s not more upset because she hated her father and only killed him in self-defense. Or maybe she’s walled off her grief and it only breaks through once every few weeks, when she has to fight off a panic attack for the whole evening. Heck, he might already have been dead and the thing she killed was just a demon wearing his flesh. We don’t know, so it feels like we don’t know Shallan either.
Reveals Are Underwhelming
If critical character information is withheld in the name of meta mystery, you get a character who’s difficult to understand. But when authors take the opposite approach, withholding information that’s not particularly important, it creates an entirely different problem: the “so what” reveal.
For most of the book, Kaladin’s biggest meta mystery is about what happened to his younger brother Tien. We know Tien was an inexperienced soldier who died in a battle, but the exact circumstances are conspicuously kept from us again and again. This goes on for the entire book, which, I’ll remind you, is 383,389 words. Even accounting for two-thirds of that not being in Kaladin’s POV, it’s still almost a Return of the King’s worth of buildup.
So after all that, what’s the big reveal? That Tien died in a regular battle because he was inexperienced and didn’t know how to fight very well. That’s it. The most mundane explanation there could possibly be, providing the most underwhelming payoff since that time we spent 15 years waiting for a painfully average Duke Nukem game. Tien’s death is still tragic, but it was already tragic because we already knew Tien had died.
This isn’t to say that only meta-mystery reveals are underwhelming. Underwhelming reveals come in all shapes and sizes. But it’s an especially common problem with meta mysteries because if authors conceal something that’s actually important, characters become difficult to understand, as we saw with Shallan. To avoid that problem, authors often hide inconsequential details. Grief over Tien’s death is a huge part of Kaladin’s character, and not telling readers about it would have been a disaster. Instead, Sanderson withholds the exact manner of Tien’s death, which builds a false expectation that it will be important.
Are There Any Benefits?
So if meta mysteries cause such problems, why do Sanderson and so many other authors use them? The most obvious answer is that authors love reveals, but good reveals are hard. If an author isn’t aware of the consequences, meta mysteries can seem like an easy way to pack their story with reveals. But in WoK’s case, Sanderson seems to be using his meta mysteries for two main purposes: adding more backstory and substituting for actual drama.
While I can’t know for certain without rewriting WoK from scratch, the three main characters have so much backstory that introducing it all at once would likely be overwhelming, especially for Shallan and Kaladin. Shallan has a really complicated history with her family, and Kaladin has so many events in his past that I simply don’t believe the book when it tells me he’s 20 years old.* By hiding some of this backstory, Sanderson can delay needing to explain it.
Meanwhile, Shallan’s plot is easily the least exciting of the three, as she spends most of it waiting for a chance to steal the artifact she’s after. In that context, a meta mystery about her father’s death at least gives the appearance that something is happening.
If you’ve made it this far, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that neither of these benefits is a worthwhile trade. When characters have too much backstory, that’s a sign that either the backstory needs to be simplified or the author should arrange the story so that readers don’t need to know everything right away. That’s easier said than done, and as someone who loves to write characters with lots of history, I sympathize. But no one ever said this writing business was easy.
Using meta mysteries as a substitute for drama is just a trap. Shallan’s third of the story is still the least engaging part, regardless of contrived backstory. Meanwhile, Kaladin’s meta mystery is an active detriment, as Sanderson often takes us away from exciting sequences in the present so we can watch a less interesting flashback instead. If part of the story isn’t holding readers’ attention, then it needs to have more happening in the present. And if a section is working well, then you don’t need to distract from it.
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Way of Kings is one of my favorite books and I basically agree with everything in this article anyway. It really feels like a book that’s written specifically for its author and his committed fans and no one else. If you’re in its specific target audience, you’ll love it to death, but otherwise, it’s confusing and unreasonably bloated and the gems of great storytelling are just buried too deeply. I mean, I’m in that target audience and I still think Sanderson should have had more restraint. The interludes are just… literally teleporting halfway across the continent to a person we’ve never met and won’t be important for like, three more books? I know they’re supposed to be foreshadowing, but foreshadowing doesn’t work when the reader just skims through them to get back to the characters they actually care about. The flashbacks… there are plenty of interesting ones, but sometimes they’re just there because Sanderson wants to stick to his pattern of flashing back to important scenes from his main characters’ lives, and they’re just… unnecessary. The worst it gets is in Book 4, when almost every flashback feels like its retreading ground that he’s already described to us adequately in the present.
I still had a wonderful( and very long) time with the four Stormlight books, and I kind of feel like the ridiculously reader-hostile style he used is part of that– there is something unique about a book that can be so unreasonably complex because his fans trust him enough to pull up with all the bullshit– but yeah, he goes way overboard.
Oh man, the interludes, I don’t love them!
There is a lot to love in WoK though. Kaladin’s story in general is very strong, I was cheering for him the whole way. I do hope this series gets finished though. It would suck for so many fans to get so invested and then not have their payoff.
Say whatever else you want about Brandon Sanderson, he is very good about being transparent with the behind-the-scenes of what he is writing right now, what order he is planing on writing things, when things are coming out, what has been passed to the edditors ect. And good with getting books out regularly. Unlike some other writers.
*(cough cough George R Martin hack hack Patrick Rothfuss choke gurgle Clive Barker)*
So, at least for the most part, WHEN the interludes come in seems to be structurally irrelevant, but the characters, events and environments do seem to be necessary. Where would you put them? A separate collection of short stories / vignettes. At the end, after the epilogue. Clearly demarcated as, “hey this is some extra stuff?”
If the information in an interlude is necessary, I would find other ways to convey it as part of the main story. If the information isn’t necessary, I would simply cut it.
Sometimes this isn’t easy. Authors often use interludes because they’re trying to do too many things at once, or to prop up an inherently flawed idea.
For example, I’ll give some spoilers for A Memory Called Empire.
In that book, the climax turns on the protagonist having knowledge of some Cthulhu aliens, but nothing in her story is at all related to some Cthulhu aliens. To prop that up, the author inserts interludes about the Cthulhu aliens so that when a secondary character info dumps about them to the protag later, we’ll already know what they are.
There’s no easy solution to this because the author has written a plot that depends on information which is largely irrelevant to most of her protagonist’s story. What needs to happen is either making the Cthulhu aliens relevant, or cutting them entirely.
I can’t say for sure what’s going on with WoK’s interludes because most of them are clearly setup for later books, but it’s probably a similar situation.
Yeah, but without the interludes we wouldn’t have stories like Dawnshard, where an interlude character gets her own novella that ends up being one of the most fun entries in the stores. It also makes the world feel bigger than things happening to a handful of people.
I have such a love/hate relationship with this series for the exact reasons you stated.
I got super immersed into it when I read the first three, despite the many instances of “oh my god another uneventful flashback” and eye-rolling gender stuff. But I do really like Kaladin and Shallan especially, and the magic and world are mostly really well thought out. The sense of atmosphere I got from the world wasn’t like anything else I’ve read (in a good way.)
I’ve been wanting to read the fourth one ever since it came out, but I feel like I need to reread the first three first since it’s all so complex and I probably forgot a lot of stuff, and…I just can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t know that I can reread them without skipping 2/3s of the text, but then what’s the point? Such a conundrum.
I had the same problem when book five of A Song and Ice and Fire came out. It had been half a decade since I read the 4th book and I could barely remember what happened.
Actually, there exist amazing in-depths summaries of all books and that’s how I could read all 4 books without re-reading every book again.
https://coppermind.net/wiki/Summary:The_Way_of_Kings
The Coppermind Wiki is awesome for that.
Okay, wow! That is incredibly useful! Thank you!
I liked most of the flashback stuff, but RoW had the weakest set for me. What I THINK happened is that having interspersed flashbacks was a big part of the last three books, so *someone* had to have them, but no-one in particular needed them. We learned plenty about Navani’s past through dialogue, internal monologue, and her perspective on the Beggar’s Feast incident. Neither Adolin nor Renarin seem to need one, ect. The only two characters who I am getting ‘Significant Untold Backstory ‘ vibes were Szeth and Lift, both of whom are already earmarked for flashbacks in later books; Szeth in book 5, and Lift somewhere in the back half.
So Sanderson gave the flashbacks to a character who died in the book BEFORE the last book, with very little of it even being plot critical, or even very interesting in its own right. The only one of Eshonai’s flashbacks I even remember individually is the last one (which, I must admit, hit me right in the feels anyways).
I feel like the Interludes are better integrated into the whole in the later books, but are more individually entertaining in WoK.
The Interludes of WoK are all essentially self-contained short stories, showing off some element of the setting. Kind of tangential, but I actually liked most of them. Axies the Collector was amusing, the two ardents with the quantum firespren are neat, the cutting back to Szeth now and then is nice, and so on.
To use the local parlance, ANTS. The N, Novelty, is strong at first but inevitably wears off quickly as readers get used to the world and characters (and this is arguably a good thing; you can think of ‘familiarity’ as the process of converting Novelty into Attachment). The Interludes are a way of drip-feeding Novelty into a story without over-complicating the main plot.
Did they strictly need to be there? No.
Would I remove or even skip them? No!
Contrast to the later ones. Lift and Rysn become major characters with their own (pretty good) spin-off novelas, Pai the Ardent of Denial is at least thematically interesting (And has some major Checkov’s Gun vibes; I have a pet theory that I will not get into here), getting into the heads of Taravangain and Moash adds some nice context, ect.
What kills me is that, in almost every instance of a meta mystery I can think of, the story would be more exciting and have more tension if you knew the information! I read a mystery once which started with a character having an awkward job interview, and it was revealed at the end of the book that the interviewer was her estranged father and that she was in an assumed identity the whole time. Since we had never met her before this scene, as a reader, she just came across as an awkward person in a fairly boring exposition scene. But the scene would have had so much more tension if we knew the information! You can’t go back and give a scene retroactive tension. Learning the stakes after the fact doesn’t erase my boredom when I was actually reading it.
Compare that with a book where we know about the main character’s imposture the whole time, like “The Talented Mr Ripley.” Every scene has tension because you know, as the protagonist does, what he’s hiding and the stakes of it coming out. When you don’t know (or don’t know for sure) what is happening, you can’t have an emotional stake in it.
I feel like with meta mysteries I have one of two experiences as a reader:
1. I don’t figure it out and the story is boring, then there’s a reveal that changes everything and I just feel annoyed: I could have been reading that book instead??
2. I do figure it out, but because the author will only coyly hint and not openly acknowledge it, I can’t commit to that reading. I understand why the scenes could potentially have tension, but the author refuses to explore it on an emotional or logistical level. I have to develop a split consciousness and read each scene as if I know and as if I don’t, and either way it’s more dull than the scene would be if the author actually got into it.
This section is basically my entire philosophy on the issue:
“You can’t go back and give a scene retroactive tension. Learning the stakes after the fact doesn’t erase my boredom when I was actually reading it.”
I won’t lie, seeing someone else get it brought joy to my heart. I would just like to know what the characters know so I can get into the story!
I agree. Fight club would have been a much better movie of we knew it was a split personality the whole time! /s
I disagree that you can’t retroactively add tension to a scene. I think there’s a lot of value in a twist that recontextualises the work up to that point. It makes a reread/reworth actually worthwhile to do, since you are essentially getting a different story. It’s why I love books like Enders Shadow or Mistborn Secret History so much.
Just to be clear, are you saying that in the movie Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character knows from the beginning that Tyler Durden is his alter ego? I don’t believe that is the case.
I must say, of all the articles I’ve read here where Mythcreants talk about Sanderson books, this might be the most baffling of them all.
While I will say that with Kaladin, it didn’t feel like Tien was a reveal that reader was supposed to be wondering about, with both Dalinar and Shallan, it felt to me that there was a very good reason for both to keep their secrets. Dalinar literally hasn’t been able to remember his own wife for nigh-on five years, to the point he can’t hear her name, so of course he’s not thinking about what happened to her, and Shallan is suppressing her memories of her family, because of all the complexities that have been mentioned here, so the mystery, to me, was always “oh, she’s deliberately suppressing it, I wonder why?”. And… I don’t know, for me, it just worked.
I feel like there just might be some fundamental difference in how we read books, cause I usually find myself agreeing with Mythcreants’ takes, yet whenever Stormlight Archive comes up, it’s like we’re reading completely different stories.
Just for the record, neither Dalinar or Shallan are suppressing their memories. If they were, that would be a different matter. They both clearly remember the information in question; Sanderson is simply choosing not to put that in the story. (this can get a little confusing with Dalinar because he actually doesn’t remember his wife, but he *does* remember why, at least I think he does.)
I believe it’s only restated clearly by the end of Words of Radiance, but Shallan is very much (initially subconsciously, later semi-consciously as she’s put under greater pressure to remember) suppressing her memories as a trauma response, and it is pointed out as something she has to overcome to start healing from what has happened to her in the past.
With Dalinar, I admit I might be mixing up what’s revealed where, as while Oathbringer is the big “let’s dig into Dalinar’s terrible no good very bad past” book, I *think* it was heavily implied how he lost those memories in Way of Kings; at least well enough that it wasn’t a shoker when the moment was shown in Oathbringer.
I gotta say, this is a head-scratching take on Way of Kings, kinda feels like the writer didn’t really understand the story. There’s a case to say that Kaladin’s meta-mysteries are applicable, I’ll give you that, but from reading some of these comments, I’m wondering if perhaps you missed the fact that Shallan and Dalinar both specifically have memory gaps and literally cannot remember the things that happened to them.
For Dalinar it’s a magic curse from the Nightwatcher, actively preventing him from learning more and later books show that no, he can’t remember the context under which he lost those memories either. Shallan’s situation is more mundane as her memory loss is a trauma response, but again, this is a fundamental part of her character. Later books also show the depths of this trauma to the point that Shallan has spilt personalities to protect her from remembering her past, and learning how to remember and accept those things is a healing journey she has to go through to unlock her powers.
Neither of these two know more than the audience at any part of the Way of Kings, both of them have completely lost these memories that are being referenced. The critique that the author is having characters hide things they know from the audience doesn’t work when the characters don’t actually know the thing either.
Maybe this series isn’t a good fit for you if basic character fundamentals like this aren’t landing, I guess. That’s unfortunate, since I think character growth and narrative arcs are one of the things Sanderson does best, especially in Stormlight, where personal growth and struggles are fundamental to the world’s magic.
‘Later books’ might very well be the problem. If I have a character who has genuine missing memories and can, for this reason, not remember something specific, like their wife or the murder of their father, it must be made clear early that it is the case and why, not kept as a ‘meta mystery’ to come out late in the story or even in later books. I can build on it later, of course, but the basics must be established early to make it understandable for the reader why character X can’t remember a specific thing.
For the record, Way of Kings (the first Stormlight book) is very clear that Shallan *does* remember what happened, Sanderson simply omits it from the narration. It sounds like this might get retconned in later books, but I can’t comment on that in this post.
Dalinar is much less clear. By the end, we know that he knows that the memory of his wife was taken by the Nightwatcher, but what details he knows about that are a lot harder to figure out.
Dalinar can’t remember his wife. But I think the meta-mystery here is more the reason why he can’t remember. He should be able to think: I let the nightwatcher took all my memories of my wife and why. On the other hand the reasons why he visited the nightwatcher are so entangled with his wife, that it might be hard to remember that, too.
I didn’t have many problems about Dalinar not remembering. I even buy Shallan because she has a trauma about it.
But that’s no excuse for Kaladin :D
I’m so old that I remember the only way you could get a door stopper in most fantasy series was to combine all the books series in one volume. Now most authors feel compelled to write around 500 pages per book at least. In small type.
I’m the -tell it all and make them bite their nails to the quick waiting for it to happen- camp.
My villain’s entire plan for her son was revealed earlier to amp up the impact when he gets the “loving mother” letter recalling (re: ordering) him home. The reader knows what awaits him, and that every sentence in it is a damn lie.
She’s utterly vile.
So at least with Dalinar Kholin you are missing part of the story. He legitimately doesn’t remember his ex-wife. It’s not that he is choosing to not share it but that his memories of her were magically removed when he visit s the Nightwatcher.
Right, the issue is that the narration deliberately obscures what he *does* know about that, like if he knows why he can’t remember, if he made the trade willingly, what he got for it, if he knows what he got for it, etc. I discuss this in “The Story is Confusing” and “Characters Can’t Be Understood.”
But he does know what both is Boon and his Curse are, as becomes quite clear in WoR. It is a topic of conversation between himself, Renarin, and Navani as they are trying to understand his high storm experiences. He very stiffly tells them that he does know what they are and that he wishes to keep them to himself, etc. Yes, his full memory of his visit to the Nightwatcher has been wiped by the Curse until Book 3, but even the abbreviated version he does know from the beginning doesn’t get revealed to the reader for quite a long time. I am a fan, but this article so lucidly explains many frustrations I’ve felt during the 5 times I’ve listened to the entire 4 books :-)
Editor’s note: We’ve removed a comment over attacks on the author (me). Disagreeing with us is fine, accusing us of not reading the book we’re critiquing is not.
Thank you Oren for this critique. I love this series and have listened to it in full now 5 times (I have a lot of alone time! Also Michael Kramer could read me the phone book and I’d be happy to listen.). But I always skip the Interludes and the very boring flashback scenes. It is so annoying. Your critique about these long ultimately not very interesting secrets held for a big reveal is very good and so true! The truly amazing big reveals like the nature of shardblades and shardplate are enough for me, together with the very good action scenes. It would be much more enjoyable to have the main characters fold in their personal history along the way as it arises, as it so often does for any of us when confronted with a situation that brings the past to mind or in a more extended in-chapter flashback on those rare occasions when many past threads suddenly rear up to confront us because of something in the present. I could have torn my hair out at Kaladin’s boring former life. It did not help me at all to understand him. Rather, the decisions he makes in the present, his inner conflicts (for which, of course, we need to have the context of his past, but these could have been much much shorter or omitted altogether), and his moments of transformational change. Which — you have not addressed in this article and to me these make up a lot for the problems you’ve done a nice job articulating. The cathartic moment of change seems to be one of Sanderson’s specialties, at least in these books. It’s built into the nature of the Nahel bond, the oaths, and so on. It too is a big reveal, but much more organic to the story and infinitely more satisfying.
Glad you enjoyed the article and are still having fun with Stormlight Archives! The nice thing about investing in a Sanderson series is you can be assured he’ll actually finish it rather than leaving you hanging.
It’s implied fairly early that Shallan murdered her father, if not stated outright even if circumstances aren’t explained till the 2nd book. As many have said though Shallan as a character is about her coming to grips with the lies she tells herself.
This is primarily a case of unreliable narrator.
And all dalinar knows is he can’t remember anything about his wife. He knew his boon and curse, but didn’t know why he really had them. He assumed his wife’s death broke him, but didn’t really know til he learned the truth. So again more just unreliable narrator.
Even if they’re ‘unreliable narrators’, that doesn’t suddenly make the story good; unreliable narrators are a terrible storytelling device. You should never conceal information in your story.
Um, you can’t just say “unreliable narrators are a terrible storytelling device” because (like almost everything else) it depends on the story and how it’s done.
Off the top of my head, I think Nabokov’s Desperation is a great novel with an unreliable narrator – you only realize the extent of his unreliability towards the end, and it works great.
Yeah, I agree: I was in a bad mood last night and it definitely affected my commenting.
also, just for the record, none of the POV characters in Way of King are unreliable narrators. An unreliable narrator is someone whose narration you can’t trust, and you can always trust the things you learn through these characters’ POVs.
The issue is that they withhold certain critical pieces of information, not that they’re lying about anything.
Shallan is absolutely an unreliable narrator. She is deeply traumatised and has DID. Her memories are suppressed, and her processing of them is a huge part of her plot across the series. Her supposed shardblade plot hole is also not a plot hole, but you will not find out why until words of radiance.
So far, in my experience with Brandon Sanderson’s writing is that he has considered all the angles and if you think you’ve found a plot hole, most of the time you’ve just found another secret that hasn’t been answered yet.
Some of us live for the meta mysteries, and for the process of piecing the plot together bit by bit.
Journey before destination.
The reveal is just one part of this. If you’re only reading for the reveal, you’re missing all the development along the way.
If Shallan had suppressed the memories in question, then she would not be an unreliable narrator. She would be communicating the situation as she knew it, and any later revelations about the memories would be a reveal to both Shallan and the reader. This would not be a meta mystery, it would be a character uncovering her own past.
This is a moot point though because in The Way of Kings, Shallan *does* remember what happened to her father and that she has a Shardblade. This is clear in the narration, the information is simply withheld from the text until near the end.
This idea that Shallan is suppressing how her father died comes up a lot when discussing Way of Kings, and I’m not sure if fans are just misremembering, if there’s a retcon later in the series, or if there’s a separate set of memories entirely that Shallan actually is repressing. Regardless, the first book is clear about what’s happening.