Unreliable narrator

Illustration by Gustave Doré for Baron Münchhausen: tall tales, such as those of the Baron, often feature unreliable narrators.

In literature, film, theatre, and music, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The use of this type of narrator is called unreliable narration and is a narrative mode that can be developed by the author for a number of reasons, though usually to make a negative statement about the narrator. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader or audience. 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 common, and 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 many 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.

The literary device of the unreliable narrator should not be confused with other devices such as euphemism, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, pathetic fallacy, personification, sarcasm, or satire; it may, however, coexist with such devices, as in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a satire whose narrator may or may not be reliable (and thus not credible). Similarly, 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.

Examples of unreliable narrators

The idea of unreliable narrators dates back to the science of hadith in Islamic historiographical literature, where narrators of hadiths (narratives) regarding Muhammad and his companions were subjected to scrutiny by 9th-century hadith scholars such as Muhammad al-Bukhari, who only included narrations from those he deemed to be reliable narrators in his Sahih al-Bukhari and rejected ones from those he deemed to be unreliable narrators. This was used as a literary device by the 10th-century Islamic philosopher, Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī. In one of his works, he assumed the role of an "unreliable narrator" providing intentionally misleading narrations of his teacher Abu Yaqub Sijistani. Al-Tawhidi "occasionally enciphered records of discussions concerning sensitive issues in cryptic language, employing literary techniques of reticence and self-contradiction to entice the attuned reader to deeper penetration and understanding."

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. In another tale, "The Seven 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 back by narrating a story to prove the unreliability of the viziers.

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 which 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. This device of an unreliable narrator misleading a man into believing the infidelity of his wife and thus murdering her, is also later used in "Un Capitano Moro", a tale from Giovanni Battista Giraldi's Gli Hecatommithi (1565), and its theatrical adaptation, Shakespeare's Othello (1603).

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, and in the Wife of Bath's, the Wife often misquotes and misremembers quotations and stories.

Novels

Wilkie Collins's 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.

Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience can impair their judgment and make them unreliable. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; even going so far as to accuse his author, "Mr. Mark Twain," of having stretched the truth in the previous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an early example of a fourth-wall breach. In contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.

Henry James's classic novella The Turn of the Screw, in which a young woman experiences ghostly hauntings summoned by supernaturally-powered children, can be interpreted as a novel of unreliable narration, but whether or not the narrator is actually delusional is (perhaps intentionally) ambiguous. The young woman, a governess, tells stories of children being "threatened by the ghost of Quint," with the possible goal of misleading the reader into becoming a "victim of the governess's unreliable narration". It is of note that the story was not interpreted thus until several decades after its original publication.

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 Leland and Hank. Many of Susan Howatch's novels similarly uses 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.

Charlie Gordon, the narrator in Daniel Keyes's epistolary novel, Flowers for Algernon is mentally retarded at the start of the novel but develops greater intelligence and understanding. Following a Rorschach inkblot test early in the novel, Charlie reports that he was told to imagine pictures in the ink contrary to the standardised way of delivering the test. Subsequently, on listening to an audio recording of the test, he realises that his memory was flawed.

In some instances, unreliable narration can bring about the fantastic in works of fiction. In Kingsley Amis's 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. An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears also employs several points of view from narrators which are all unreliable.

Films

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 was killed 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 1945 film noir classic Detour is told from the perspective of an unreliable protagonist who may be trying to justify his actions.

Mentally impaired narrators may describe the world as they perceive it rather than as it really is. In the film, Bubba Ho-tep, the main character is either Elvis Presley or an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff. He appears to suffer from Alzheimer's disease, making it unclear how much of his story is real.

The entire story in the film Fight Club we discover at the end is told by an anonymous, unreliable narrator.

At the end of the film The Usual Suspects (1996) the viewer learns that the protagonist Verbal Kint's entire convoluted tale, told during a police interrogation and involving many characters and events, is composed from the visual detritus of the office of the very police detective in charge of the interrogation.

Music

An unreliable narrator may appear in songs with a narrative. Eminem often uses his "Slim Shady" persona as an unreliable narrator. In "Stan", however, the unreliable narrator is actually an obsessed fan whose messages to Shady/Eminem become increasingly erratic and eventually commits a murder-suicide. Shady is presented in this song as a reliable secondary narrator.

Television

In the final episode of M*A*S*H, unreliable narration is used to create dramatic effect.

In the House episode "No Reason," it is slowly revealed that the events portrayed may be House's hallucination rather than reality.

Works featuring unreliable narrators

• Martin Amis's Time's Arrow
• Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
• Angela Carter's Wise Children
• Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
• Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
• Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho
• F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
• Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
• Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans
• James Lasdun's The Horned Man
• Patrick McGrath's The Grotesque
• Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
• J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
• Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
• Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me
• Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus
• Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost

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

• Memento
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Fight Club
• Hero (2002)
• Rashomon
• "The Storyteller" (2005)

References

Textbook

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