What Is an Unreliable Narrator? Definition, Types and Examples

An unreliable narrator is a storyteller whose account the reader cannot fully trust. The narrator may be lying, mistaken, too young to understand events, or unable to see the truth about themselves. The reader picks up clues the narrator misses, and the gap between what the narrator says and what actually happened becomes part of the story's meaning.

Most unreliable narrators speak in the first person, using "I", because the reader has only their word to go on. But the device is less about deception than about attention: it asks you to read between the lines.

Who coined the term?

The American critic Wayne C. Booth, who taught at the University of Chicago, coined the phrase in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Booth separated the narrator from what he called the implied author: the picture of the writer that a reader builds from all the choices in a work. In his terms, a narrator is unreliable when the narrator's values and judgments differ from those of the implied author. The author, in other words, knows more than the narrator and lets the reader know it too.

The idea is much older than the term. Readers had long noticed narrators who misjudge their own stories; Booth gave critics a precise way to talk about them.

Types of unreliable narrator

Critics sort unreliable narrators in different ways. William Riggan, in a 1981 study of first-person narrators, described types he called the pícaro, the madman, the naïf and the clown. For everyday reading and writing, four broad kinds cover most cases.

The naive narrator

A child or an inexperienced adult reports events honestly but lacks the knowledge to understand them. Readers see what the narrator does not. Riggan's examples of the naïf include Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield.

The deliberately deceptive narrator

This narrator knows the truth and hides it, from other characters or from the reader. The pleasure lies in discovering the deception, and often in rereading to see how it was done.

The self-deceiving narrator

This narrator is not lying to us so much as to themselves. They tell events accurately but explain them in ways that protect their pride, their choices or their picture of the world. The reader slowly sees the cost of that self-protection.

The narrator whose perception is distorted

Some narrators are in the grip of an obsession, a delusion or a crisis, so the way they perceive events cannot be taken at face value. Riggan's label for this type was the "madman"; today many readers simply speak of a narrator whose state of mind colors everything they report.

Many narrators mix several types. A teenager can be both naive and self-deceiving; a liar can also fool himself.

Unreliable narrator examples

These ten works are widely discussed as examples. The notes avoid spoilers beyond what the device itself gives away.

Work	Author	Year	Narrator	Kind of unreliability
"The Tell-Tale Heart"	Edgar Allan Poe	1843	Unnamed	Distorted perception; insists on being sane
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	1884 (UK), 1885 (US)	Huck Finn	Naive
The Turn of the Screw	Henry James	1898	A governess, inside a frame story	Ambiguous: are the ghosts real?
The Good Soldier	Ford Madox Ford	1915	John Dowell	Rambling; questionable account of his own role
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd	Agatha Christie	1926	Dr James Sheppard	Deliberately deceptive
The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	1951	Holden Caulfield	Naive and emotional
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	Humbert Humbert	Self-justifying, deceptive
We Have Always Lived in the Castle	Shirley Jackson	1962	Merricat Blackwood	Deceptively simple voice
The Remains of the Day	Kazuo Ishiguro	1989	Stevens, a butler	Self-deceiving
Gone Girl	Gillian Flynn	2012	Nick and Amy, in turn	Two competing accounts

A few notes on how these work:

• Poe's narrator keeps stressing that he is sane while describing a murder in obsessive detail. The more he argues, the less we believe him.
• The Turn of the Screw has divided critics for nearly a century. Early readers took it as a straightforward ghost story; in 1934 the critic Edmund Wilson argued that the governess imagines the ghosts. Many later readers think the ambiguity is the point.
• Christie's novel is famous for a late revelation about its narrator. It is best read knowing nothing more.
• Humbert Humbert presents his story as a memoir addressed to a jury. His eloquence is designed to win sympathy, and much of the novel's power comes from the reader resisting it.
• Stevens reports events carefully but interprets them in ways that spare him painful conclusions about his work and his relationships. Ishiguro's novel won the Booker Prize in 1989.

How to spot an unreliable narrator

Literary scholars point to three sources of doubt: clues inside the text, conflicts with what we know about the world, and our familiarity with how stories usually work. In practice, watch for these signs:

• Contradictions. The narrator says one thing in chapter two and something different in chapter nine.
• Protesting too much. "I am perfectly calm" repeated three times is not calm.
• Gaps and convenient memory. The narrator remembers every detail except the important one.
• Other characters' reactions. People in the story respond in ways that do not fit the narrator's version.
• Lies told to others. A narrator who lies easily to characters may be lying to you.
• Extreme self-justification. Long explanations of why something was not their fault.
• A frame or a late reveal. An outer story, a second narrator or a twist can expose what the first account hid.

How to write an unreliable narrator

An unreliable narrator only works if the reader can see past them. Your job is to plant evidence the narrator overlooks or bends.

1. Decide what the truth is. Write a private paragraph describing what really happened. You cannot distort a story you have not settled.
2. Choose the reason for the distortion. Is the narrator young, ashamed, protecting someone, or hiding a crime? The reason shapes every sentence.
3. Let the facts and the interpretation drift apart. Report details accurately, then have the narrator draw the wrong conclusion. Readers trust details and question conclusions.
4. Use other voices. A line of dialogue from another character can quietly contradict the narrator.
5. Play fair. On a second reading, the clues should have been there all along. A twist that relies on information withheld from the page feels like a trick.

Here is a short original example of a self-deceiving narrator:

Margaret said I never listened, which was unfair, because I could have repeated every word she said that evening. She talked about the job in Denver for nearly an hour. I told her it sounded fine. Then I asked whether she had paid the gas bill, because one of us had to be practical.

The narrator thinks he is proving he listened. The reader hears a man who answered an hour of hopes with a question about a bill.

If you are working on the basics first, our guides to narrative writing and story structure cover point of view and plot.