Untrustworthy Characters (A.V. Laider)

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Untrustworthy Characters When reading a fiction story it is common to let your grip on reality go and fall into the story. You let go of what you know to be true, and believe what is being read. If a character is flying on a magic carpet, you go with it, instead of just thinking “this can’t be happening”. Letting your mind go like this makes it easy for authors to trick you into trusting a character. After you trust a character it can set the story up for a twist. Max Beerbohm’s “A.V. Laider” and Saki’s “The Open Window” both use this technique to trick the reader at the end. It is important to know what it takes to make a story fall into the fiction category, but not to be too quick to trust a character, unless they give you reason to. It is very common for the main character or characters to change near the end; sometimes more than you would expect. Beerbohm and Saki are both masters of achieving the readers willing suspension of disbelief. Fiction is invented by the author, and there are no rules or boundaries; for how far they can go with a story. In a good story, the main character or characters must change, in order to keep it interesting and to complete the story as well. Sometimes the characters can change completely and it turns out they are nothing like they seemed throughout the entire story. This is what Beerbohm and Saki do to throw in a big twist at the end. They make the reader trust the characters and then feel dumbfounded at first after getting to the end of the story. It is best to be questioning the characters while reading a story. Every detail about a character is there for a good reason. The author is constantly building on each character to make the story entertaining. They are giving you a better image of the characters and making you feel as if you know them. Once you have a good image for a character it can get tricky.
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