Chime Narrator:

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

First Person (Central Narrator)—Briony

Briony tells her own story in Chime, and this first person narration helps makes the story both interesting and often confusing. As a narrator, Briony is sometimes the silent observer, sometimes a villain in her own mind, sometimes the central hero, and sometimes a damsel in distress. So when she asks Eldric, "'Do you want the version of the story in which I'm a hero, or do you want the true version?'" (12.92), Briony clues us into the difficulty of relying on her as a first person narrator. Girl's got a lot of versions of the same tale to pick from.

Her story is so heavily influenced by personal opinions and confused and faulty memories that we're not confident we know the whole story until the very end. And even then, Briony's admitted lack of self-awareness means that the reader has to take their understanding with a grain of salt. Though Briony has come a long way in terms of self-acceptance and understanding of who she is and the life she's leading, without access to insights from other characters, we're stuck following an unreliable narrator through, well, swampy terrain.