Ten Unreliable Narrators We Don’t Trust

January 20, 2025

Literature

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

When it comes to telling a story, few things are as important as who is telling it. The narrator acts as the story’s filter, picking and choosing what to share, what to omit, and how characters and events are portrayed. Some stories benefit from a third-person omniscient narrator, an all-knower who can jump from subject to subject like the eye of god. On the other hand, a third-person limited narrator is bound to one character and their perspective but still exists outside of them.

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Sometimes, however, a story benefits from a narrator who is a character themselves. Writer Wayne C. Booth describes this practice excellently in his book Rhetoric of Fiction: “Many novels dramatize their narrators with great fullness, making them into characters who are as vivid as those they tell us about.”

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First-person narration can create a sense of immediacy and urgency as the story’s events happen to and around the teller; it can also create a feeling of claustrophobia, as we as readers are strictly limited to their point of view. And, like any other character, this narrator can often be deeply flawed, leading us to question their motives.

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When we doubt the truth of a narrator’s storytelling, we learn to read between the lines, creating two stories in one. There is the story as the narrator tells it, and the story as we choose to believe it. While the unreliable narrator became a popular tool in Modernist writing, it dates back centuries.

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In honor of this fascinating and often frustrating narrative voice, we’ll travel back through time to meet some of literature’s most unreliable narrators.

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The Pardoner: The Pardoner’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

Dating as far back as the 1300s, we have narrators whose stories should be taken with multiple grains of salt. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, the titular Pardoner is a corrupt religious figure who intentionally misrepresents moral lessons.

Unnamed Narrator: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Henry James’ gothic horror novella features multiple layers of narration, adding even more room for faulty representation and interpretation. The unnamed narrator is at a gathering of friends when one of them, Douglas, reads from a manuscript written by his sister’s late governess.

Charles Marlow: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s critique of European colonial rule in Africa employs the highly flawed perspective of Charles Marlow, a steamer captain for a Belgian company operating in the interior of Africa. Marlow’s fascination and borderline obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, as well as his colonialist view of the Congo’s inhabitants, leave plenty of room for doubt and follow-up questions.

Clarissa Dalloway: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

A defining work of Modernist fiction, Mrs. Dalloway employs a stream-of-consciousness narrative style to explore Clarissa’s character and the nebulous line between sanity and insanity. In Woolf’s novel, a simple action—like Clarissa’s decision to purchase flowers at the start of the story—sets off a train of mental meandering and psychological exploration.

Nick Carraway: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The characters of The Great Gatsby are so outrageously flawed that our narrator Nick Carraway can mostly fly under the radar. But Nick is by no means an objective source of information, and Fitzgerald wants us to know that. Consider how Nick confesses that he’s “one of the few honest people I have ever known” in the context of a passage that explains how he is going to abandon his fiancée in Chicago to be with Jordan Baker!

Holden Caulfield: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

From the unaddressed grief over his brother Allie’s death to his infatuation with Jane Gallagher, to the recurring “fuck you” graffiti Holden sees everywhere, The Catcher in the Rye is undoubtedly the story of a boy on the brink. The novel’s very title is based on Holden’s mishearing and misunderstanding of the poem Comin’ Through the Rye, a sure sign that we should be skeptical of his account.

Oedipa Maas: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

King of the postmodern, Thomas Pynchon knows how to write a character that is not to be trusted. As narrator Oedipa Maas falls down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole of an age-old feud between two postal companies, we are left wondering if she has lost her mind, if everyone around her has lost their minds, or if there really is a sinister plot afoot.

Unnamed Narrator: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

If the chronic insomnia alone wasn’t enough to convince us that Fight Club’s unnamed narrator may not have the most reliable perspective, impersonating a seriously ill person at support groups and starting an underground fight ring most certainly should. Unlike Fight Club, the first rule of unreliable narrators is that you should ask questions.

Neighborhood Boys: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

In Jeffrey Eugenides’ gorgeous 1993 novel, his narrators are not only unreliable but plural. Told from the perspective of a group of teenage boys, the novel follows the tragic deaths of the beautiful Lisbon sisters, with whom all the boys are infatuated.

Cadence Sinclair Eastman: We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

As the narrator of this article, it’s not up to me to determine if I’m reliable or not. But I swear I’m telling the truth when I say that this book had me sobbing. Cadence is the eldest granddaughter of the wealthy and seemingly perfect Sinclair family, and she’s so unreliable that the last 20 pages of this book will hit you hard enough to rival the amnesia our poor narrator is suffering from.

From Carraway to Chaucer, Caulfield to Conrad, we hope you enjoyed this list of unreliable narrators and the authors who wrote them. Remember to always read with a healthy dose of doubt!

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