What is an Unreliable Narrator?: Penning the Prevaricating Protagonist
Sean Glatch | June 10, 2024 |
When you can’t trust the person who’s telling you a story, we typically refer to them as an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is someone whose account of the story cannot be depended upon, either because they are lying to you, lying to themselves, or because they have a skewed perspective on the story (and want you to believe it, too).
Wait a minute—doesn’t that make every narrator unreliable? While it’s true that most narrators (including many 3rd person narrators) have biases and limited points of view, there’s a difference between being an unreliable narrator, and simply not being omniscient.
So, what is an unreliable narrator? Let’s examine what makes a narrator unreliable. Along the way, we’ll examine some unreliable narrator examples in fiction, before discussing how to write an unreliable narrator yourself.
What is an Unreliable Narrator?: Contents
Unreliable Narrator Definition: What is an Unreliable Narrator?
When we talk about the unreliable narrator, we are typically discussing narrators from the 1st person point of view. An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose point of view we cannot trust, as they have revealed themselves to have a flawed relationship to reality. We’ll unpack that flawed relationship in a moment.
Unreliable narrator definition: A narrator whose point of view we cannot trust, as they have revealed themselves to have a flawed relationship to reality.
Now, unreliable narrators typically don’t signpost their unreliability. The narrator isn’t telling you “hey, this is my point of view, but you can’t trust me!” Rather, these narrators reveal their biases or ulterior motives in the text, and it takes textual analysis for us to recognize that they’re not telling us the true story.
The term “unreliable narrator” was coined by the literary critic Wayne C. Booth. Booth’s intent with this term was to highlight narrators whose moral or ethical imperatives differ from that of the author’s. In other words, the author disagrees with the narrator’s point of view and ethical outlook.
This is a perfectly valid unreliable narrator definition, but the term has since expanded to encompass any narrator who cannot be trusted to tell a story faithfully.
What makes a narrator unreliable?
So, if the narrator doesn’t tell us they’re lying, how do we know they’re unreliable?
Here are a few ways we can tell:
- Narrative incongruities. The narrator gives us contradictory information at different points in the text. Perhaps something happens in the plot, but the narrator remembers that plot point differently in the future.
- Untrustworthy motives. Sometimes, a narrator is really, really trying to convince you of their side of the story. “I didn’t do it!” “I’m not a bad person!” (Reader: they typically did it; they’re typically a bad person.)
- Serious character deficits. No character is perfect, and good people sometimes do terrible things. But if a narrator has committed serious misdeeds (murder, assault, pathological lying, psychopathic tendencies, etc.), or if they seem to be naïve, gullible, misinformed, etc., we might want to pay closer attention to their word choice.
- Poor memory recall. How well can we trust a narrator if they keep admitting to details they can’t remember clearly?
- Words of advice from other characters. Some stories, particularly novels, might include multiple characters’ perspectives. One narrator might clue you in on a different narrator’s unreliability. (Unless the first narrator is the unreliable one. Or they’re both unreliable. Hmm.)
What effect does an unreliable narrator have on the reader?
The above clues are, of course, generalities. More than anything else, unreliable narrators encourage us readers to use our critical thinking, and to engage with characters who are complex and imperfect. Nobody in real life has a perfect, all-encompassing, entirely accurate point of view; unreliable narrators don’t either.
Nonetheless, an unreliable narrator will impact the ways we read and interpret a story. Typically, the narrator’s unreliability will relate to the story’s themes and ideas. An unreliable narrator might impact the reader by:
- Calling into question their account of the story’s events, details, etc.
- Trying to convince the reader of something morally questionable.
- Making the reader dislike the narrator, or else seeing them as an antihero.
- Shaping the reader’s understanding of human experience, especially through the lens of unethical people.
- Messing with the reader’s understanding of truth and reality.
Now, how do writers achieve this effect? In a bit, we’ll examine how to write an unreliable narrator. But first, let’s look at some unreliable narrator examples in literature.
Unreliable Narrator Examples
The following unreliable narrator examples all come from published works of literature. Since you can’t be expected to have read each of these novels, we’re including an excerpt from the text that clues us into the narrator’s unreliability, as well as a breakdown of each narrator’s characterization.
1. Humbert Humbert in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita is a complex and often uncomfortable novel. The following scene has sensitive content including child sexual assault.
At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person”). In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in a single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as described from the hills of Vaucluse. But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row.
But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, “enfant charmante et fourbe,” dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles.
This is an uncomfortable passage to read, no doubt about it. Humbert acknowledges, several times in the novel, that what he did was gross and immoral. And yet, so much of the writing seems to justify his actions, or even try to convince the reader that what he did wasn’t wrong at all.
You can see this “justification” happening throughout the above passage. Humbert reminds the reader that pedophilia has many precedents, and the only things that have changed are the laws and cultures. Is it really so despicable, then, that he engaged in a desire so natural to human nature, as evidenced throughout the centuries?
Of course it is. But if you’re not a careful reader, you might find yourself siding with this man whose prose style is lyrical, almost enchanting. Lolita is an uncomfortable novel, for sure, but the discomfort is not just Humbert’s acts of child sexual assault. It’s not just the fact that he knows the age when girls hit puberty. Rather, it’s the way he tries to get you to sympathize with him, going so far as to tie his desire for Lolita (which he calls “love”) to the death of his childhood lover, Annabel.
Humbert is anxious for you to see him as a normal person, and it’s uncomfortable how normal, how likable even, he can be (though perhaps not in this particular passage). In trying to convince you that he would never harm the innocence of a child, he’s neglecting to tell you that he already has, that he did it knowingly, that he even killed a man who got in the way of his desire.
Lolita often gets mischaracterized as a novel that supports or endorses pedophilia. Chalk it up to a lack of critical thinking among its critics, if they’ve even read the novel. Make no mistake: Nabokov reviled Humbert Humbert, and the novel itself is supposed to be a satire on people like Humbert. But this mischaracterization stems, in part, to just how convincing this unreliable narrator can be.
2. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
He [Jay Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
There is significant scholarly debate about whether or not Nick Carraway is, in fact, an unreliable narrator. Much of the discussion surrounds Nick’s involvement in the plot. Since he is largely a documentor of the story’s insane events, but not a participant in them himself, we are at the mercy of Nick’s biases and moral interpretations.
One argument for Nick’s unreliability is his preferential treatment towards Gatsby. Every character in this novel is blindsided by wealth and the illusions of the American Dream, but Nick can’t seem to depict Gatsby in the same way. Compare the above passage, which is when Nick first meets Gatsby, to the following passage, which occurs towards the novel’s conclusion:
“I told him the truth,” he [Tom] said. “He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house—” He broke off defiantly. “What if I did tell him? That fellow [Gatsby] had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.”
There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.
“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful—”
I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.
It is obvious that Nick despises Tom and believes everything he says to be phony. But Tom is right about one thing: that Jay had “thrown dust in Nick’s eyes,” or else convinced him that he was much more morally pure than he actually was.
In other words, Nick is just as infatuated with Gatsby as Gatsby was with Daisy. This infatuation fundamentally skews the novel’s favor. Gatsby is the beautiful victim of the American Dream, whereas Tom and Daisy are merely the wealthy enablers of America’s cruelty.
All of this is to say that, if you don’t read The Great Gatsby carefully and critically, you might not notice the double standard Nick seems to carry for the novel’s different characters. Everyone in this novel is detestable, but Nick’s love for Gatsby shields him from the same criticism within the text. It’s possible that Nick’s feelings for Gatsby are homoerotic in nature, but even if they aren’t, Nick’s preferential treatment calls into question whether or not every detail in this novel is true and well-accounted for. Nick Carraway: unreliable narrator.
3. The Second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
I was curious to know Mrs Danvers’ reaction to the news. Since that afternoon I dreaded even the sound of her voice down the house telephone, and by using Robert as mediator between us I was spared this last ordeal. I could not forget the expression of her face when she left the library after that interview with Maxim. I thanked God she had not seen me crouching in the gallery. And I wondered, too, if she thought that it was I who had told Maxim about Favell’s visit to the house. If so, she would hate me more than ever. I shuddered now when I remembered the touch of her hand on my arm, and that dreadful soft, intimate pitch of her voice close to my ear. I did not want to remember anything about that afternoon. That was why I did not speak to her, not even on the house telephone.
The preparations went on for the ball. Everything seemed to be done down at the estate office. Maxim and Frank were down there every morning. As Frank had said, I did not have to bother my head about anything. I don’t think I licked one stamp. I began to get in a panic about my costume. It seemed so feeble not to be able to think of anything, and I kept remembering all the people who would come, from Kerrith and round about, the bishop’s wife who had enjoyed herself so much the last time, Beatrice and Giles, that tiresome Lady Crowan, and many more people I did not know and who had never seen me, they would every one of them have some criticism to offer, some curiosity to know what sort of effort I should make. At last, in desperation, I remembered the books that Beatrice had given me for a wedding present, and I sat down in the library one morning turning over the pages as a last hope, passing from illustration to illustration in a sort of frenzy. Nothing seemed suitable, they were all so elaborate and pretentious, those gorgeous costumes of velvet and silk in the reproductions given of Rubens, Rembrandt and others. I got hold of a piece of paper and a pencil and copied one or two of them, but they did not please me, and I threw the sketches into the waste-paper basket in disgust, thinking no more about them.
Rebecca is a fascinating novel, and its protagonist, whose first name is never revealed to us, makes for a remarkable unreliable narrator. She doesn’t intend to be unreliable (certainly not like Humbert Humbert or, arguably, Nick Carraway), and she’s not a “bad person,” but her naïveté and self-absorption forces the reader to question everything she tells us.
The novel follows the Second Mrs. de Winter’s new marriage to Maxim de Winter, whose first wife, Rebecca, died tragically. Most compelling about Rebecca is how it pretends to be a romance novel. The narrator has a tendency to romanticize and fantasize, particularly about Rebecca herself, whom the entire house seems to be mourning, and who seems imbued with the qualities of a perfect wife. The narrator exerts much of her energy trying to live up to these nebulous standards.
In fact, most of the narrator’s descriptions are unnervingly romantic. She describes her own name which, again, is never revealed to us, as being “lovely and unusual.” Everything she describes has a certain air of exaggeration, not quite unbelievable, but written, perhaps, with the excitement and intensity of a teenager. And then there’s the narrator’s portrayal of people who don’t like her, which is certainly dramatized, with every piece of description somehow heightened and tarnished all at once. In the above excerpt, she describes the voice of Mrs. Danvers (the novel’s seeming antagonist) as being “dreadful soft, intimate”. That “dreadful” is quietly poisoning the well.
And within that description, do we even pay attention to the fact that the narrator was crouching in the gallery, eavesdropping? Rebecca is a novel where the reader should question everything. The narrator expertly disguises her own neurotic feelings and behaviors in a language that seems innocent, masking the depravity of her choices.
Make no mistake: the narrator is the victim of a negligent marriage, a toxic household, and the ghost of a woman who wasn’t as perfect as she seemed. The novel is a searing critique of gendered standards and the tough decisions women have to make in terrible situations. What’s ironic is how Rebecca is so often marketed as being a romance novel, when it’s anything but—but that’s how powerful an unreliable narrator can be.
Other Unreliable Narrator Books
Admittedly, it’s a pleasure to read a novel and discover that it has an unreliable narrator. Such revelations are always surprising and make me want to read the novel again. So, if you’re not the kind of person who likes spoilers, read ahead to learn how to write an unreliable narrator.
But, if you’re looking for more novels to read and study the craft of unreliable narration, here are some other unreliable narrator books:
- Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
- The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
- Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
This is only a handful of novels with unreliable narrators, and each narrator is unreliable in their own special way. Some of them tell you upfront; others reveal their unreliability towards the end; others, still, require close scrutiny. Some of them know they’re lying to you, while others don’t even realize they’re lying to themselves. All of them make for complex and entertaining works of literature.
How to Write an Unreliable Narrator: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself
If you plan on writing an unreliable narrator, use these 5 questions to guide your character development.
1. What is the nature of their unreliability?
As you’ve seen in the above unreliable narrator examples, no two narrators lie in quite the same ways. So a crucial part of understanding your character’s personality is understanding the ways they’re unreliable.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of unreliable personality traits:
Does your unreliable narrator:
- Fabricate: Are they intentionally inventing stories or details that aren’t true?
- Hyperbolize: Are details exaggerated? And is it unintentional, or are they doing this to persuade or distract the reader?
- Misrepresent: Are the core details correct, but certain details altered?
- Project: Does your narrator’s insecurities or biases get projected onto other people, contaminating the truth of what happened?
- Have a bad memory: Did they really just forget the facts of what happened?
Is your unreliable narrator:
- Naïve: Do they simply just not know any better?
- Misinformed: Are they telling the truth, but with faulty information at hand?
- Bad with details: Do they keep saying conflicting things, intentionally or otherwise?
- Untrustworthy: Do the other characters in the novel treat the narrator with skepticism?
- Antiheroic: Are they morally unconventional?
2. Are they lying to themselves, or to the reader?
This question is implied in the above set of possible traits, but it deserves its own consideration.
Your unreliable narrator will lie. That much is indisputable. But do they know that they’re lying?
If so, do they know they’re lying about everything? Or are certain lies intentional, while others slip out?
And are they lying to themselves? Do they know, unconsciously, that they’re doing so? Or is it really not on their mental radar?
Lean into the complexity of these questions: they’re paramount to developing well-crafted unreliable narrators.
These questions can get downright philosophical, once you start considering the nature of truth, its many-faceted quality, and how we, as people, relate to the truth in our own biased and imperfect ways. Lean into the complexity of these questions: they’re paramount to developing well-crafted unreliable narrators.
3. How does their representation of the facts differ from what is objectively true?
First, you need to know what actually happened. Then you need to know how your narrator represents the facts.
It’s really like there are two plots in the novel. One is the plot of what actually happened, and one is the plot your narrator wants the readers to believe. These plots will inevitably get muddied up and tangled, as the discerning reader will glean what’s true, what’s false, and what’s inconsequential.
Nonetheless, if you’re the type of writer who plots in advance, make sure you have both of these plots mapped out. Otherwise, you might also find yourself believing in details that didn’t actually happen.
4. What is their end goal?
Why is your narrator lying? What do they want you to believe? What do they want to believe themselves?
Take a look at the unreliable narrator examples. The end goals of each narrator seems to be:
- Humbert Humbert: To convince you (and possibly himself) that he’s not the bad guy; to generate sympathy for the torment he’s endured (as a pedophile and murderer).
- Nick Carraway: To set down the facts of what happened and honor Jay Gatsby’s tragically shortened, beautiful life (as a result, misrepresenting who Jay was).
- The Second Mrs. de Winter: To live up to the ideals of the wife she’s replacing and, thus, the expectations of a perfect housewife (despite how little she knows about Rebecca and the de Winter household).
You can see how much variance there is in narrative intent just with these three examples. You also get a sense of how each narrator is unreliable, how they are or aren’t lying to themselves, and where certain plot points could get misrepresented.
5. How is their unreliability thematically relevant to the story?
All of the above questions lead us to the story’s thematic elements.
To be clear: theme is not necessarily something a writer needs to consider in advance. Just as often as themes are written intentionally, themes also emerge in the work organically. A writer is not always in control of the meanings of their text.
Nonetheless, a novelist writes an unreliable narrator with the intent of commenting on themes within the text. Humbert Humbert’s unreliability is tied into Lolita’s satirical nature; Nick Carraway’s unreliability relates to the illusions of the American Dream; The Second Mrs. de Winter is a window into sexism and unfair gender expectations, particularly within toxic households and marriages.
Just as much as the narrator’s intentions must be explored, so must your intentions as the author.
Just as much as the narrator’s intentions must be explored, so must your intentions as the author. Make no mistakes, those intentions will be debated and misinterpreted. The unreliable narrator examples we shared have been subject to endless scrutiny and misrepresentation.
But that’s part of what makes these stories so interesting. And, anyway, knowing your purpose for writing an unreliable narrator will help keep you grounded in your approach to writing the story.
Get Feedback on Your Unreliable Narrators at Writers.com
Writing an unreliable narrator is tricky. When you’ve got a draft that’s ready for feedback, the instructors at Writers.com are ready to help. Take a look at our upcoming online fiction classes, where you’ll receive guidance and workshopping opportunities on your untrustworthy, messed up characters.
Sean,
This is wonderful ! And close to home, and I’m going to spend time reading it…
yes, the time I’m not spending writing.
Thank you. Carol
I’m glad this helps, Carol! Happy writing and not-writing 🙂
Thanks, Sean. Love this
and all of your others I’ve treated myself to so far. So very intelligent and generous. On this long and at times very lonely journey, I feel I’ve struck gold with Writers.com.
Thank you for the kind words, David! I’m so glad we’ve been able to help you along your writing journey.
Warmest,
Sean
Question: Can a narrator be unreliable and still be honest in relating their POV? That is to say, they are not necessarily lying or misrepresenting their experience as such, but perhaps are unreliable in the sense that they have become “skewed” as a result of their experience? This would suggest that the unreliability is more an issue of lying to themselves as to their own nature rather than misrepresenting, hyperbolizing or being otherwise untrustworthy in that sense. Can a character that is anti-heroic, for example, be otherwise reliable and still be considered an unreliable narrator?
As usual, a very helpful and illuminating article, Sean. Thank you!
Hi Daniel,
Absolutely! Narrators can be unreliable simply by living in a skewed sense of reality, or not having all the information they need to tell the story. Among the examples we shared, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier feels closest to this—she’s not intentionally lying to the reader, but her naivety and entrapment in social norms makes her misrepresent the story nonetheless. Nick Carraway might be an example of this, too, depending on whether or not you think he’s aware of what he’s doing… like everyone in the story, he’s blinded, in some way, by the allure of wealth and the American Dream.
As for antiheroes, they’re not inherently unreliable, though I’d hazard that the average antihero narrator is more likely to be unreliable than the average narrator in general.
I’m happy this article is helpful!
Warmest,
Sean
Dear Mr. Glatch –
Where were you 30 years ago when I was in grad school deeply immersed in language centered theories of human behavior? Do allow me to make this one astute comment on your very brilliant essay here.
WOW!
Thank you. I hope to take any of your course offerings one day when the budget allows.
Sincerely,
Hi Karen,
I hadn’t yet been conceived! Nonetheless, I’m grateful for your kind words, and pretty envious of what you studied in grad school. I’m sure I could learn quite a few things from you.
Many thanks!
Warmest,
Sean
Sean: Excellent essay and really helpful to me in flushing out my Unreliable Character, the country western bandleader and murderer Spade Cooley. My true crime book or maybe a historical fiction book moves between three major narrators and the Cooley character is a perfect UR character as described by you.
You outlined and described Cooley and gave me more understanding and insights into his character as I have already written it. Also, how his unreliability and moral corruption fits into the theme of Hollywood and Los Angeles in the 1930-1950 period.
I’m so happy this helps you write your novel, Richard! I look forward to reading it once it’s out in the world. 🙂
Warmest,
Sean