Unreliable narrator - Definition and Overview

In literature and film, an unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability or powerful bias. Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience makes them inherently unreliable. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; in contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.

Many have suggested that all first-person narration, and indeed narration generally, is inescapably unreliable.

Works featuring unreliable narrators

Works of fiction featuring unreliable narrators:

• Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Humbert Humbert)
• Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Charles Kinbote)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (Miles Coverdale)
• Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (the unnamed governess)
• Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat", "The Cask of Amontillado", and perhaps "Ligeia"
• Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
• Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
• Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground
• Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club
• Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho
• John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure
• Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter
• Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday
• Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun and the vast majority of his other work.
• Lu Xun's A True Story of Ah Q

Films told from an unreliable point-of-view (or points-of-view):

• Christopher McQuarrie's The Usual Suspects (Verbal Kint)
• Christopher Nolan's Memento (Leonard Shelby)
• Mary Harron's American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
• Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (James Cole), Brazil (Sam Lowry), and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Munchausen)
• Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, based on Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "In a Grove" and "Rashomon"
• Alexander Payne's Election
• The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (The Stranger)