Joel Miller as an unreliable narrator in "The Last of Us"

Major spoilers ahead for the events and ending of The Last of Us.

Whenever I talk about my favorite game of all time, The Last of Us is always guaranteed to come up. It's one of the first games that I played where the main character wasn't necessarily a good person, but they were so well-written that I had a hard time separating myself from Joel's motivations. I understood Joel as a person--despite Joel being a fictional character. My earlier discussions of unreliable narrators made me wonder if you could consider Joel as an unreliable narrator. We see the game through his perspective, so that would make him the narrator--and since he is the narrator, how does his role affect the other characters of the game?

https://thelastofus.fandom.com/wiki/Joel_Miller, Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us.

The Last of Us isn't necessarily the first piece of fictional media to portray a "bad" character as the protagonist--far from it. It just happens that this game holds a very special place in my heart as a prime example of video games as an artistic medium. And Joel is no exception--he's a human being made up of code and pixels, and yet he embodies one of the most realistic fictional characters (let alone protagonist) I have seen in any media. Needless to say, this game is hyped up for a reason.

But it's through Joel's more human, flawed actions, that makes this story so compelling in the first place (you could argue that his role as an unreliable narrator is the draw of the game). In the very opening of the game, we watch Joel experience the beginning of the zombie apocalypse; except, this opening part of the game is mostly played through the eyes of his daughter, Sarah. It switches to Joel towards the end, whenever Sarah becomes too injured to walk. So the first time you ever play as Joel, he's carrying his injured daughter, running from hordes of the undead. Talk about setting the tone, right? Things only get worse for Joel, in probably one of the most iconic scenes from the game. Joel and Sarah run into what seems to be a military officer, initially relieved to see another human being willing to protect them. Slowly, as the two try to approach the officer, it's clear that he's hostile as well--receiving orders to kill them instead of protect them. Joel realizes this a second too late as the officer opens fire on both Joel and Sarah. The officer is then killed by Tommy, Joel's brother, who arrives just before the officer could do any more damage. But the worst damage had already been done. Sarah was killed, not by a zombie, but by a human being. She bleeds out in the arms of her father, who desperately tries to comfort her, to do anything to keep her alive. But it's no use.

Then, 20 years pass. And that's when the game really starts: with a beaten down, depressed, and honestly kind of broody, Joel Miller. Not that you can really blame him, since he's had a hard time trying to find something to live for after losing his daughter. Up to this point, he's lead a life of deception and violence, killing innocent people to survive (along with some zombies, but mostly people). Eventually, he became a smuggler, which is where he met Ellie--a young girl seemingly immune to the cordyceps (the thing causing the zombie stuff). The two don't get along instantly, with Joel being a pretty distrustful person. But as the game continues, the connection between the two characters becomes undeniable--Ellie sort of acts as an adoptive daughter to Joel, filling the void that Sarah left in his heart.

As such, Joel's motivations start to shift. Originally he was supposed to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies (a growing militia group, reoccurring throughout the game). Instead, he begins to protect, going to extreme lengths to do so. The role of Joel as a player character here relies on this balancing act between making the progression of their relationship believable, while simultaneously convincing the player that Joel's reactions are realistic. But that doesn't mean he's reliable as the source of the story--remember, Joel is a liar, thief, murderer, and a plethora of other wonderful titles. Whether or not his status as a "bad" person was caused by the apocalypse or not, he cannot separate who he was with what he has done--at least not to the other characters in the game, and at most, to the player as well. As a player, we can infer whether or not Joel is lying based on what we see; but what we see is what Joel sees as well. We are playing his story, the story of a liar.

This can be seen in the final moments of the game, after Joel murders an entire hospital of people to save Ellie from a fatal surgery that would have, potentially, created a cure for the cordyceps. Joel doesn't care, though. What matters is that Ellie is in danger, so he rescues her. And at the end of the game, Ellie asks him what happened, why he saved her. And Joel lies: he tells her that there were others like her, and the cure wasn't possible. Ellie tells him to swear he isn't lying, which he says he isn't. The game ends as Ellie simply says "okay."

At this moment, we know that Joel is lying because the player is Joel. We just killed that whole hospital of Fireflies, doctors and surgeons included. This is arguably the moment where the player begins to question Joel, if they haven't begun to already. Did we do the right thing? Obviously not, right? But the motivation behind such a horrible act is there, and it's extremely realistic. After all, Joel wasn't about to lose another daughter--not again. The Last of Us is a story about the monsters that are human beings, not zombies. And no character better encompasses this theme than the main character himself, our unreliable narrator, Joel Miller. Joel Miller, a good man in a bad situation, becomes a monster.

And maybe we shouldn't have trusted him from the beginning--if only his reasoning weren't so real, so painful, and so sympathetic. In the end, the monster he becomes directly affects the story, and the characters around him--Ellie included. For more on that, check out this post by my friend AJ covering The Last of Us: Part 2, and Ellie's survivor's guilt: https://ajcosta15.wixsite.com/my-site-1/post/the-last-of-us-part-2-and-survivor-s-guilt-and-more

Joel's role as an unreliable narrator starts benign, and grows to shape major plot points later on. So perhaps he isn't so unreliable in a traditional sense, but more of a blend of the biased and the liar. The player dislikes the Fireflies because Joel does. The player is slow to trust other characters because Joel is. And we both fought tooth and nail to keep Ellie safe.