Unreliability and Communal Meaning-Making in Narrative Podcasts

Abstract

This paper explores strategies of aural meaning-making and the inherently unreliable narrative structure and content of audio narrations. The three chosen case studies, Welcome to Night Vale, Malevolent, and The Silt Verses are free-to-access narrative podcasts featuring a mixture of horror, science-fiction, and fantasy elements. Utilising social platforms like Patreon, X, and YouTube to receive support from their audience and allow listeners to directly impact the narrative, they offer diverse blends of scripted and improvised storytelling. Their unreliability is both part of their narratives and a source of their overarching discourses on identity and community. Rather than exclusively destabilising any sense of Self, the podcasts evoke comfort and connectedness through reiterative instances of characters, narrative structures, and usage of dis- as well as misinformation. Their contextualisation of unreliability and utilisation of aurality to present stories about ambiguity allow for novel insights into the workings of unreliable narration in today’s mediascape. As narrative podcasts continue to flourish as sites of (social and discursive) alterity and divergence, the paper attests to a collective embrace of the uncertain in sounds and stories.