An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose account of the story can't be taken at face value. They may lie, leave things out, misunderstand what they see or judge it badly, so the reader works out what really happened from clues the narrator gives away without meaning to.
The critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): a narrator is reliable when they speak for the values of the work as a whole, and unreliable when they don't. Most unreliable narrators speak in the first person, because "I" can be wrong in ways an all-seeing narrator can't.
Types of unreliable narrator
William Riggan's 1981 study of first-person narrators sorted them into four types, all named in its title: pícaros, madmen, naïfs and clowns. Many writing guides add a fifth, the liar, who deceives on purpose.
| Type | Why you can't trust them | Example |
|---|---|---|
| TypePícaro | Why you can't trust themBrags and embroiders, the hero of every scrape | ExampleMoll Flanders (1722) |
| TypeMadman | Why you can't trust themA disturbed mind bends what they see | Example"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) |
| TypeNaïf | Why you can't trust themToo young or innocent to grasp what they report | ExampleHuckleberry Finn (1884) |
| TypeClown | Why you can't trust themDigresses, jokes, won't tell it straight | ExampleTristram Shandy (1759–67) |
| TypeLiar | Why you can't trust themDeceives on purpose, outright or by omission | ExampleThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) |
Unreliable narrator examples
TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
His evidence for his sanity is how calmly he planned the old man's murder. Every proof points the other way, and the reader sees it from the first line.
"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.
Jim, the enslaved man who ran from Miss Watson, has been sold by a con man and is locked up on the Phelps farm. Huck writes to tell her where he is, as his upbringing says he must, then tears the letter up and accepts damnation. His facts are right and his morals upside down: he believes he is choosing sin, and the reader sees the best thing he does in the book.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
John Dowell spent nine seasons at the spa town of Nauheim with his wife, Florence, and their friends the Ashburnhams, without seeing that Florence and Edward Ashburnham were lovers. He tells the story out of order, revises his opinion of Edward as he goes, and admits he has told it "in a very rambling way."
It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread.
Dr. James Sheppard narrates Poirot's investigation the way Watson narrates Holmes's, and readers trust him for the same reason. He is the murderer. In the last chapter he quotes this sentence back with some pride: "All true, you see." What he leaves out is the ten minutes after the letter arrived at twenty to nine, when he killed Ackroyd. Readers have argued ever since about whether the trick was fair.
Stevens, an English butler, drives to Cornwall in 1956 to see Miss Kenton, once the housekeeper. On the way he defends his late employer, Lord Darlington, who hosted secret talks with Nazi Germany's ambassador, and recalls dismissing two Jewish maids on his orders as a matter of professional duty. He never says he loved Miss Kenton. When she admits she sometimes imagines the life they might have had, he concedes, to the reader and not to her, that at that moment his heart was breaking.
Chapters alternate between Nick, whose wife Amy has vanished, and Amy's diary of their marriage. Nick keeps an affair from the police and from the reader. Part Two reveals that Amy is alive and wrote the diary to frame him for her murder. It works because the diary reads like the most honest voice in the book.
How to write an unreliable narrator
Decide first what your narrator gets wrong, because that decides what kind of clues you plant. The critics James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin (1999) split unreliability along three lines:
- Facts. They misreport what happened, or leave it out, like Sheppard's missing ten minutes. The clues are evidence or other accounts that don't fit.
- Meaning. They report accurately and misread it, like Dowell watching an affair for years. The clues are details the reader interprets differently.
- Values. They judge wrongly, like Huck damning himself for doing right or Stevens calling obedience dignity. The clue is the reader's own sense of right and wrong.
Then decide when the reader finds out. Poe and Twain let you see through the narrator from the start, and the pleasure is in watching the gap. Christie and Flynn hide it until a reveal, and the pleasure is the reread, so the earlier pages have to read differently afterward rather than turn out false. Henry James never settles it. The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a governess's account read aloud inside a frame story, and since Edmund Wilson's 1934 essay critics have argued over whether she saw ghosts or imagined them.
Readers catch an unreliable narrator through signals you place on purpose: a contradiction, another character whose reaction doesn't fit, a denial repeated once too often, a jump in time at the moment that matters, a judgment out of step with the events. Too many and nothing the narrator says lands. Too few and the twist arrives with nothing behind it. The usual cheat is a narrator who thinks about everything except the one thing they would think about most. Christie avoids it: Sheppard is writing the case up to publish one day as the story of one of Poirot's failures, so of course he keeps quiet about his own part.
Announced: I wasn't jealous of my sister's book. Not even a little. I was happy for her, honestly.
Let slip: I wasn't jealous of Dana's book. I bought two copies the week it came out, one for home and one for the shelf at work, and I read every review so I'd be ready to defend her. The one in the Sunday paper was unfair. I read it four times to be sure, and I kept it.
The first version tells the reader to doubt the narrator. The second lets them catch it alone: no sentence in it is false, and every detail points the same way.
To check the signals, give the draft to a beta reader and ask two questions after the reveal: when did you start to doubt the narrator, and did the ending feel earned?
Unreliable vs. limited narrator
Every first-person narrator is limited, and that alone doesn't make them unreliable. Dr. Watson misses what Holmes sees, but what he reports is true as far as it goes. The critic Greta Olson (2003) draws a second line inside unreliability: fallible narrators are wrong because of their age, situation or lack of information, and untrustworthy ones are bent by motive or temperament.
The same lines run through third-person narration. Jane Austen's Emma (1815) stays so close to Emma's thinking that first-time readers share her certainty that Mr. Elton is courting Harriet Smith. He is courting Emma.
Related terms: point of view, frame story, epistolary novel and red herring. To choose a viewpoint, read Point of view in writing. To plant clues a reader only sees on the second read, see Foreshadowing examples from literature.
