What Is An Unreliable Narrator?Īn unreliable narrator is a literary device used in narrative fiction in which the story is told through a first-person perspective, but that perspective is not reliable–that is, what we’re being told isn’t always true. In other fiction - for example, in novels of psychological realism - unreliability is not so much a matter of deliberate deception as it is of perspective: how things seem to one character may not be how they seem to another.Īnd in some works of fiction-for example, Franz Kafka’s.
These stories often depend on the “twist” at the end, where everything you thought you knew about the story turns out to be wrong - and where, therefore, all that you’ve been told so far has turned out to be suspect as well.
The concept of an unreliable narrator is important in lots of different kinds of fiction, including novels and films.īut it’s most often associated with mysteries and thrillers, in which tales are told by people who turn out not to be trustworthy. This can occur at many levels: the narrator may be misperceiving or lying to the audience (that is, to the reader or viewer), narrating from beyond the grave (the dead tell no tales), or recounting events that happened when they were too young to have reliable memories of them. What Is an unreliable narrator What Is an unreliable narrator in literature and film?Īn unreliable narrator is a story-teller whose credibility has been compromised.
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