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Unreliable narrator
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An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in

literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been

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seriously compromised.[1] The term was coined in 1961 by

Current events

Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction.[2] This

narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author
for a number of reasons, usually to deceive the reader or

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Trke

audience. [1] Unreliable narrators are usually first-person

narrators, but third-person narrators can also be unreliable.
The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear.
For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a
plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being
severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in
which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to his
unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the
revelation until near the story's end. This twist ending
forces the reader to reconsider their point of view and
experience of the story. In some cases the narrator's
unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at,
leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should
be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.
Historical novels, speculative fiction, and clearly delineated
dream sequences are generally not considered instances of
unreliable narration, even though they describe events that
did not or could not happen.

Illustration by Gustave Dor for Baron

Mnchhausen: tall tales, such as those of
the Baron, often feature unreliable
narrators.

Contents [hide]
1 Examples of unreliable narrators
1.1 Historical occurrences
1.2 Novels
1.3 Films
1.4 Television
1.5 Comics
2 Works featuring unreliable narrators
3 References
3.1 Footnotes
3.2 Textbook
3.3 External links

Examples of unreliable narrators

[edit]

Historical occurrences

[edit]

The literary device of the "unreliable narrator" was used in several medieval fictional Arabic tales of
the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights. [3] In one tale, "The Seven

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Viziers", a courtesan accuses a king's son of having assaulted her, when in reality she had failed to
seduce him (inspired by the Qur'anic/Biblical story of Yusuf/Joseph). Seven viziers attempt to save
his life by narrating seven stories to prove the unreliability of the courtesan, and the courtesan
responds by narrating a story to prove the unreliability of the viziers. [4] The unreliable narrator device
is also used to generate suspense in another Arabian Nights tale, "The Three Apples", an early
murder mystery. At one point of the story, two men claim to be the murderer, one of whom is
revealed to be lying. At another point in the story, in a flashback showing the reasons for the murder,
it is revealed that an unreliable narrator convinced the man of his wife's infidelity, thus leading to her
murder.[5]
Another early example of unreliable narration is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In "The
Merchant's Tale" for example, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, allows his misogynistic
bias to slant much of his tale. In "The Wife of Bath", the Wife often makes inaccurate quotations and
incorrectly remembers stories.

Novels

[edit]

Wilkie Collins' early detective story The Moonstone (1868) is an early example of the unreliable
narrator in crime fiction. The plot of the novel unfolds through several narratives by different
characters, which contradict each other and reveal the biases of the narrators.
A controversial example of an unreliable narrator occurs in Agatha Christie's novel The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd, where the narrator hides essential truths in the text (mainly through evasion,
omission, and obfuscation) without ever overtly lying. Many readers at the time felt that the plot twist
at the climax of the novel was nevertheless unfair. Christie used the concept again in her 1967 novel
Endless Night.
Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience can impair their judgment and make them
unreliable. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Huck's innocence leads him to make overly
charitable judgments about the characters in the novel.
Ken Kesey's two most famous novels feature unreliable narrators. "Chief" Bromden in One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest suffers from schizophrenia, and his telling of the events often includes things such
as people growing or shrinking, walls oozing with slime, or the orderlies kidnapping and "curing"
Santa Claus. Narration in Sometimes a Great Notion switches between several of the main
characters, whose bias tends to switch the reader's sympathies from one person to another,
especially in the rivalry between main character Leland and Hank Stamper. Many of Susan
Howatch's novels similarly use this technique; each chapter is narrated by a different character, and
only after reading chapters by each of the narrators does the reader realize each of the narrators has
biases and "blind spots" that cause them to perceive shared experiences differently.
Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, often tells the story
in such a way as to justify his pedophilic fixation on young girls, in particular his sexual relationship
with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Similarly, the narrator of A. M. Homes' The End of Alice
deliberately withholds the full story of the crime that put him in prison the rape and murder of a
young girl until the end of the novel.
In some instances, unreliable narration can bring about the fantastic in works of fiction. In Kingsley
Amis' The Green Man, for example, the unreliability of the narrator Maurice Allington destabilizes the
boundaries between reality and the fantastic. The same applies to Nigel Williams's Witchcraft.[6] An
Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears also employs several points of view from narrators whose
accounts are found to be unreliable and in conflict with each other. [7]
Mike Engleby, the narrator of Sebastian Faulks' Engleby, leads the reader to believe a version of
events of his life that is shown to be increasingly at odds with reality. [8]
Zeno Cosini, the narrator of Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience, is a typical example of unreliable
narrator: in fact the novel is presented as a diary of Zeno himself, who unintentionally distorts the
facts to justify his faults. His psychiatrist, who publishes the diary, claims in the introduction that it's a
mix of truths and lies. [9]

Films

[edit]

One of the earliest examples of the use of an unreliable narrator in film is the German expressionist
film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, from 1920. [10] In this film, an epilogue to the main story is a twist
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ending revealing that Francis, through whose eyes we see the action, is a patient in an insane
asylum, and the flashback which forms the majority of the film is simply his mental delusion. A much
more recent film (and play) to use a similar plot device is Amadeus. This tale is narrated by an
elderly Antonio Salieri from an insane asylum, where he claims to have murdered his rival, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart. It is left unclear whether the story actually happened, or whether it is the product
of Salieri's delusions; this is especially ambiguous, as there is no concrete historical evidence that
Salieri killed Mozart.
In Citizen Kane (1941), the story of Charles Foster Kane is told by five different acquaintances of his,
each with varying opinions of the character.
In the 1996 film, Courage Under Fire, Denzel Washington's character is tasked with researching the
events related to a posthumous Medal of Honor nomination for a female helicopter pilot (played by
Meg Ryan). The research involves getting accounts of the events from the other people present,
other military members who survived. Their accounts are seen as flashbacks and while the basic
facts are the same in each memory, the details vary greatly.
The 1945 film noir Detour is told from the perspective of an unreliable protagonist who may be trying
to justify his actions.[11][12][13]
In Possessed (1947), Joan Crawford plays a woman who is taken to a psychiatric hospital in a state
of shock. She gradually tells the story of how she came to be there to her doctors, which is related to
the audience in flashbacks, some of which are later revealed to be hallucinations or distorted by
paranoia. [14]
The film Rashomon (1950), adapted from In a Grove (1921), uses multiple narrators to tell the story
of the death of a samurai. Each of the witnesses describe the same basic events but differ wildly in
the details, alternately claiming that the samurai died by accident, suicide, or murder. The term
"Rashomon effect" is used to describe how different witnesses are able to produce differing, yet
plausible, accounts of the same event, with equal sincerity.
The narrator of the 1950 Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard, William Holden's character of down-andout screen-writer turned kept man Joseph C. Gillis, is an unreliable narrator because his narration of
the film is delivered from beyond the grave, as Gloria Swanson's character, former silent-screen
actress Norma Desmond, had shot and killed him the night before the earliest events in the film
(which he narrates posthumously, and in flashback) began.
The 1995 film The Usual Suspects reveals that the narrator had been deceiving another character,
and hence the audience, by inventing stories and characters from whole cloth. [15][16]
In the 1999 film Fight Club, it is revealed that the narrator suffers from multiple personality disorder
and that some events were fabricated, which means only one of the two main protaganists actually
exists, as the other is in the narrator"s mind. [17]
In the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, it is eventually revealed that the narrator is suffering from paranoid
schizophrenia, and many of the events he witnessed occurred only in his own mind.[18]

Television

[edit]

In the final episode of M*A*S*H, unreliable narration is used to create dramatic effect; Hawkeye
Pierce, now a patient of Sidney Freedman in an army mental hospital ward, recounts a traumatic
memory of a recent event. In the recounting a key component is substituted with something more
innocuous, leaving the viewer wondering why that incident resulted in his mental illness. Later,
psychoanalysis with free-association reveals the true memory, which is much more disturbing and
can be clearly seen as the cause.
In the episode "Three Stories" of the show House, M.D., the title character, Dr. Gregory House, gives
a lecture recounting the stories of three patients who came in with leg pain. House constantly
changes details and lies about the stories to make them more interesting and, as is ultimately
revealed, to conceal the identity of one of the patients.
How I Met Your Mother creator Craig Thomas has explicitly said that the series narrator, "Future
Ted", voiced by Bob Saget, is an unreliable narrator. The narrator would sometimes come up with
"what if?" conversations for other characters and almost revealing key plot points. [19]
In the episode "Remember this " (Season 3, episode 4) of the British sitcom Coupling, the story of
the first meeting of Patrick and Sally is recounted by several people, all of whom turn out to be

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unreliable narrators. Most jokes in this episode hinge on disparities amongst certain details of the
story (and their psychological implications).

Comics

[edit]

In Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, the Joker, who is the anti-hero of the
story, reflects on the pitiful life that transformed him into a psychotic murderer. Although the Joker's
version of the story is not implausible given overall Joker storyline in the Batman comics, the Joker
admits at the end of The Killing Joke that he himself is uncertain if it is true. [20]
Between his first appearance in 2008 and 2010, the human identity of Red Hulk, a tactically intelligent
version of the Hulk, was a source of mystery. In the 2010 book Fall of the Hulks: Gamma, Red Hulk
is depicted in flashback to have killed General Thunderbolt Ross at the behest of Bruce Banner (the
Hulk's human identity), with whom he has formed an alliance.[21] However, in the 2010 "World War
Hulks" storyline that flashback is revealed to have been false when, during a battle with Red SheHulk, the Red Hulk reverts to human form, and is revealed to be General Thunderbolt Ross
himself.[22]

Works featuring unreliable narrators

[edit]

Martin Amis's Time's Arrow[23]

Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights [24]
Peter Carey's Illywhacker [25]
Angela Carter's Wise Children [26]
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone [27]
The works of Bret Easton Ellis, most prominently American Psycho[28]
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury[1]
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby [29]
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier [30]
Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans[31]
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw [32]
James Lasdun's The Horned Man [33]
Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes[34]
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire [35]
Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles [citation needed]
Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version [36][37][38]
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children'
Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy
The works of Gene Wolfe, most prominently The Book of the New Sun and The Fifth Head of
Cerberus [39]
William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon
Robert Graves's I, Claudius
Films with an unreliable point-of-view (or points-of-view):
A Beautiful Mind directed by Ron Howard
Amarcord directed by Federico Fellini[40]
Big Fish directed by Tim Burton [41]
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari directed by Robert Wiene[42]
Fight Club directed by David Fincher [43]

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Hero (2002) directed by Zhang Yimou[44]

Memento directed by Christopher Nolan[45]
Rashomon directed by Akira Kurosawa[46]
Stage Fright directed by Alfred Hitchcock [47]
"Box" segment from "Three... Extremes" (2004) directed by Takashi
Miike [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57]
The Usual Suspects directed by Bryan Singer [58]

References

[edit]

Footnotes

[edit]

1. ^

abc

"How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II", by James N. Frey (1994) ISBN 0312104782, p. 107

2. ^ "Professor Wayne Booth"

, an obituary, The Times, 14 October 2005

3. ^ Irwin, Robert (2003), The Arabian Nights: A Companion, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, p.227,
ISBN1860649831
4. ^ Pinault, David (1992), Story-telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, Brill Publishers, p.59,
ISBN9004095306
5. ^ Pinault, David (1992), Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, Brill Publishers, pp.937,
ISBN9004095306
6. ^ Martin Horstkotte. "Unreliable Narration and the Fantastic in Kingsley Amis's The Green Man and Nigel
Williams's Witchcraft". Extrapolation 48,1 (2007): 137151.
7. ^ "THE MYSTERY READER reviews: An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears" .
Themysteryreader.com. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
8. ^ Roberts, Michle (18 May 2007). "Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks. Sad lad, or mad lad?" . The
Independent (London). Retrieved 2009-03-21.
9. ^ "James Wood reviews Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo, edited by William Weaver, Memoir of Italo
Svevo by Livia Veneziani Svevo, translated by Isabel Quigly and Emilio's Carnival by Italo Svevo,
translated by Beth Archer Brombert LRB 3 January 2002" . Lrb.co.uk. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
10. ^ Film Studies: Don't Believe His Lies, by Volker Ferenz
11. ^ Detour (1945) (Ferdy on Films, etc.)

[dead link]

12. ^ [1]
13. ^ "> Detour (1945)" . Film Talk. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
14. ^ "Possessed movie review" . A Life At the Movies. 20 June 2010.
[dead link ]

15. ^ Schwartz, Ronald (2005), Neo-Noir: The New Film Noir Style from Psycho to Collateral
Press, p.71, ISBN9780810856769

, Scarecrow

16. ^ Lehman, David (2000), The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection (2nd ed.), University of Michigan
Press, pp.221222, ISBN9780472085859: "[H]e has improvised, spontaneously and with reckless
abandon, a coherent, convincing, but false-bottomed narrative to beguile us and deceive his
interrogator."
17. ^ http://www.poewar.com/john-hewitt%E2%80%99s-writing-tips-explaining-the-unreliable-narrator/
18. ^ Hansen, Per Krogh, Unreliable Narration in Cinema , University of Southern Denmark "...[In] the
second part of the film a large part of what we hitherto have considered part of the objective perspective
(persons, actions, places) are exposed as being mental constructions and projections made by the
protagonist...We have not only seen the events from his perspective, but we have seen what he thinks
happens."
19. ^ "'How I Met Your Mother's' Craig Thomas on Ted & Barney's Breakup, Eriksen Babies and The Future
of Robarn" . Zap2it.com. Retrieved 2008-07-21.
20. ^ David Leverenz, "The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to Batman", The "American
Literary History" Reader, ed. Gordon Hutner (New York: Oxford UP, 1995) 276. ISBN 0195095049.
21. ^ Loeb, Jeph. Fall of the Hulks: Gamma Marvel Comics. (Feb 2010)
22. ^ Loeb, Jeph. Hulk vol. 2 No. 22 Marvel Comics. (July 2010)
23. ^ The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/01/home/amis-arrow.html?

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Unreliable narrator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

_r=1&oref=slogin .
24. ^ http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-0564(197303)27%3A4%3C449%3ATUNIWH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6
25. ^ Asthana, Anushka (2010-01-23). "Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey"
(London).

. The Times

26. ^ "Comedy Is Tragedy That Happens to Other People" . The New York Times. 1992-01-19.
27. ^ "Historicizing unreliable narration: unreliability and cultural" . Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 13
November 2011.
28. ^ Sarah Webster. When Writer Becomes Celebrity. The Oxonian Review of Books, Vol. 5, No. 2 (spring
2006) [2]
29. ^ Thomas E. Boyle. Unreliable Narration in "The Great Gatsby". The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain
Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Mar., 1969), pp. 2126 [3]
30. ^ Womack, Kevin and William Baker, eds. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. Broadview Press,
2003. [4]
31. ^ Mudge, Alden. "Ishiguro takes a literary approach to the detective novel." [5]
32. ^ Helal, Kathleen, ed. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Works. Enriched Classics. Simon and
Schuster, 2007. [6]
33. ^ "DarkEcho Review: The Horned Man by James Lasdun" . Darkecho.com. 3 May 2003. Retrieved 13
November 2011.
34. ^ Landay, Lori (1998), Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American
Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, p.200[7]
35. ^ "Dowling on Pale Fire" . Rci.rutgers.edu. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
36. ^ The New York Times: "The Way He Was -- or Was He?"
37. ^ Newsday: "'Barney's Version' of a Colorful Life"
38. ^ The Globe and Mail: "Barney's Version: Barney as an Everymensch"
39. ^ "Interview with Gene Wolfe Conducted by Lawrence Person" . Home.roadrunner.com. Retrieved 13
November 2011.
40. ^ Tom Dawson, [8]

, reviewing Amracord on BBC films

41. ^ Lance Goldenberg, "There's Something Fishy About Father"

2004.

, Creative Loafing Tampa, 8 January

42. ^ Ferenz, Volker, "Fight Clubs, American Psychos and Mementos," New Review of Film and Television
Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1 November 2005), pp. 133159, (link , accessed 5 March 2007, reg. required).
43. ^ Church, David, "Remaining Men Together: Fight Club and the (Un)pleasures of Unreliable
Narration ", Offscreen, Vol. 10, No. 5 (31 May 2006). Retrieved on 14 April 2009.
44. ^ "''Hero'' review in the ''Montreal Film Journal''" . Montrealfilmjournal.com. 26 March 2003. Retrieved
13 November 2011.
45. ^ [9]

[dead link ]

46. ^ [10] Rashomon article on Turner Classic Movies

47. ^ The "lying" opening flashback, Hitchcock/Truffaut
48. ^ "Three... Extremes"

. Chicago Sun-Times.

49. ^ Hartlaub, Peter (2005-10-28). "FILM CLIPS / Opening today" . The San Francisco Chronicle.
50. ^ Vu, Ryan. "Three... Extremes (2004)" . < PopMatters. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
51. ^ Stuart, Gwynedd (26 October 2005). "Trilogy of terror | Movie Review | Creative Loafing Atlanta" .
Atlanta.creativeloafing.com. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
52. ^ Tobias, Scott (26 October 2005). "Three... Extremes | Film | Movie Review" . The A.V. Club.
Retrieved 13 November 2011.
53. ^ "Three... Extremes Filmcritic.com Movie Review" . Filmcritic.com. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
54. ^ "Three...Extremes (2004) Review" . Hollywood Gothique. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
55. ^ Patrick (6 April 2006). "Thoughts on Stuff: Three...Extremes" . Thoughtsonstuff.blogspot.com.
Retrieved 13 November 2011.
56. ^ "Three Extremes Horror Movie Review from BHM: Engrossing and Unforgettable" . Best-horrormovies.com. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
57. ^ Adams, Sam. "Screen Picks" . Citypaper.net. Retrieved 13 November 2011.
58. ^ [11]

"'Where Is My Mind?' Chaucer's 'Unreliable Narrator' Goes Neo-Noir: (The Usual Suspects,
Fight Club and Memento)" by Jen Johans

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Textbook

[edit]

Smith, M. W. (1991). Understanding Unreliable Narrators. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of
English.

External links

[edit]

Henry Sutton's top 10 unreliable narrators

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