Secondary Character Job, the Revealers

I found Booth's narrator "reliability" to be a very interesting concept, and something that, indeed, has become much more prevalent in modern literature. It's realistic, because certainly not all storytellers are truthful (one could make an easy case that, in fact, none are), so why should the protagonists we read about be truthful? This kind of narrator psychological examination is very difficult to relay in words though. How are we as readers supposed to recognize the protagonists (especially if the narration runs close to the protagonist's consciousness) unreliability through the text? This is the job of the secondary character (though not entirely).

Where primary characters can be very unreliable, secondary characters generally are not. They act, much like the implied author, as foils to aid in examining the protagonist's flaws in character and judgement. Booth writes, "both reliable and unreliable narrators can be unsupported or uncorrected by other narrators [in this sense secondary characters as well] or supported or corrected. When an author wants to relay that a character is correct in his judgements or morals, he simply surrounds him with those that agree. When the main character is incorrect, he must then be surrounded by those who oppose, including the "implied author" himself, which can act in this way as somewhat of a secondary character (as long as he doesn't insert himself too much).

Think "Catcher in the Rye"; it is often the other characters (the prostitute, the sister) that, in their actions, reveal to us the flawed character of Holden, although we are closest to Holden throughout the novel. Another example would be "The Sound and the Fury", where only through Quentin, Cady, and Jason's later narrations are we able to make sense of Benji's tangle of unreliable and knotted prose.

Thus the job of a secondary character is very important, crucial to the text (especially if your desire is to prove protagonist unreliability). This can be somewhat related to Killingsworth's description of irony, that you need a shift of party identification, in a sense. The secondary characters make this shift possible, allowing the reader to understand them and thus distance themselves from the protagonist and his opinions. The reader, in coherent understanding with the secondary character revealers, can become the "We" with them, the "We" that is then able to view the primary characters as the "Them", seeing their flaws from a distance.

I've heard in many English classes that whenever you find a story moving slowly just add another character. Now I see why. Secondary characters can reveal more truth about your primary character than often he can (especially if unreliable), that is their job.