In Nella Larsen’s Passing, one of the main characters, Irene, highly influences the tone and subject of narration. The reader begins to look at situations from the point of view of Irene and believe Irene’s speculations because they are the only ones shown to the reader. Only Irene’s thoughts and mental conclusions are captured in the third person narration of the novel. As a result, Irene becomes an unreliable source for narration because her ideas are taken to be the truth, despite the one-sidedness of her ideas. However, in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, the protagonist Emma Lou is anything but unreliable. In The Blacker the Berry, the narrator creates a balance between the truth and Emma Lou’s version of truth due to her extreme color consciousness. As a result, the narrator is able to present Emma Lou’s ideas and pokes holes in her ideas — inevitably, leaving it up to the reader to settle the score.
The narrator neutralizes Emma Lou’s emotional states and color conscious fits in order to get the truth across to the reader. The author allows Emma Lou to spill her ideas but makes her look foolish and delusional in the process using Alva’s character. Alva acts as a neutralizing voice of reason for Emma Lou in the part where she cries and Alva soon leaves her. Emma Lou shares that she was a target at the theater and at the gathering with Alva and his friends because on those occasions, she felt her dark color was being ridiculed. In response, Alva says, “You’re being silly, Emma Lou.” Then Alva points out Emma Lou’s color consciousness and her obsession with “color, color, color,” to the reader and to Emma Lou. Depending on the reader, equal weight can be given to both arguments. The narrator accounts for Emma Lou’s exaggerated ideas that might make her an unreliable character.
Another part that shows Emma Lou’s reliability under similar technique is when she returns home, has a fling with Weldon. Emma Lou shares with the reader her fantasies about making a life with Weldon. Then, the narrator “makes it real” by making the reader aware that Emma Lou has constructed this fantasy world within her mind unaware of other people’s feelings and other elements. It’s the narrator’s way of stepping in and setting it straight for the reader that Emma Lou’s feelings are highly influenced by who she is. After Weldon had to leave Emma Lou to pursue money, Emma Lou once again resorted to color as the issue. The narrator clears up Emma Lou’s distorted thoughts by saying, “It never occurred to her [Emma Lou] that the matter of color never once entered the mind of Weldon.” Once again, the narrator steps in to keep the story straight. The narrator is able to share Emma Lou’s ideas in their entirety and make them reliable by explicitly pointing out the flaws in Emma Lou’s thought processes to the reader. In this way, the reader is well informed of the situation and of Emma Lou’s character and thinking processes. The narrator in Passing failed to do this and as a result made Irene’s account of events the only account and an unreliable one at that.
