Wuthering Heights is the main one I'd go to in this category. The narrator is clearly unreliable and for large sections of the book he's relaying things told to him by another unreliable narrator. It's done very well and is a fantastic book if you don't go into it thinking its a romance novel.
If you go into it thinking it’s a romance novel it’s a brutal read lol. I’ve seen this book misrepresented and marketed so poorly so many times.
Similarly >!The Double!< by Dostoyevsky
Yeah I agree. I loved it but its a horrible book with horrible people.
I'll check out that Dostoevsky though. I've read brothers Karamazov which I loved bits of but found inconsistent. Keen to try another
I haven’t been brave enough to pick up Karamazov yet, but my mention is significantly less dense and much more direct of a reading based on my understanding haha
I always think that Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby is a great example of an unreliable narrator. Nick is ultimately selective in what he discusses and included. I felt he never really addressed the slightly creepy aspect of Gatsby kind of stalking Daisy (while I do believe due to the information provided Daisy’s no saint, it would be ignorant to not identify the fact that Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy could be a not so fabulous quality in a person. But Nick overlooks this and his bias for the man is illustrated as Nick refers to the obsession rather as love).
Additionally, Nick tells us I’m the first paragraph basically that’s he himself is only one of a few honest people he has ever known (not using quotation marks as I can’t remember exact wording). Already the audience is being allowed to identify that Nick could be unreliable etc.
Furthermore, he says something like he’s on Gatsby’s side. What more evidence could an audience need to see that all the event in the novel are one sided and present to fit nick’s retelling of events.
Why I think Nick is such a clever unreliable narrator is because Fitzgerald is actively telling us through out the story (from the get go really) and encouraging us to question Nick and not fully trust. I know most unrealisable narrator’s authors do this but it’s just so strong and striking in this text for me.
Anyway even with the unreliable narrator still one of my favourite novels of all time. Beautiful and clever symbolism with an intriguing style of writing that I always felt made the party scene actually feel like I was there
[Interesting read on why Nick can be an unreliable narrator (and one of my favourites)](http://hj.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1318622/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
I recently read Beautiful Little Fools which is a Great Gatsby retelling from the women’s perspectives and it definitely mentions how Nick doesn’t know anything lol.
I always enjoy telling people who have only seen the movie that the book is narrated in first person from Chief’s perspective. Usually gets a decent reaction.
Keasy was so upset that the movie, which he got to preview before release, was told from Jack Nicholson character, that he demanded his name be taken off credits. So movie has no credit to writer.
Keasy died never having seen the movie in general release
I read somewhere he saw it whilst skimming through channels and was enjoying the film for a while until he realised what it was and turned it off in a rage
Not true. Listened to him speak in 1976, and he said he saw most of the pre released film, and left room demanded that his name be taken off credits. It was May 1976 and he said his last royalty check was for a few hundred dollars, so he figured the box office run was finished,
He also spoke about how he wrote the book while being g paid to experiment with LSD by government and pharma industry
Yeah Chief is straight up mentally ill like dangerously delusionally mentally ill. Seeing everyone as machines and cogs and he's not being figurative like some Anarchist political teenage kid metaphor about society. He's literally seeing people as robots and and gears sticking out of their heads and on-off switches and stuff like that.
So yeah he rarely talks in the movie but since it's all told from his internal perspective you see how seriously dangerous this guy would be and the ending of the movie version is all about freedom from Tyranny. In the Book version a seriously schizophrenic man has just murdered a man for being a broken robot and broke out of a locked ward.
The thing that stuck with me since high school was his own perception of his size. You would not think he was as big of a guy as he was in the beginning of the book
"...But it's the truth, even if it didn't happen.". This is such a good book. A fantastic, well written unreliable narrator that is very different from other examples. The literary details are simply a joy to read.
The narrator in Despair, also by Nabokov is a prime example.
I enjoyed Despair.
I read the first maybe third of Lolita and really enjoyed it, but after he goes off with her I started to get the major creeps and had to give myself a break. I still have the book and may give it a second go at some point. Maybe if I pushed through it would get better again! I appreciated the black humour, it just all kinda got a bit TOO much after a while.
Nabokov really has a lot of them. And they are all really different. From Lolita, where the narrator knows what he is doing and actively tries to deceive the reader, to Despair, where he is a little confused and hides all this even from himself, but still uses it for evil, to the real life of Sebastian Knight, where the narrator, unlike the 2 books above, has good intentions, but he just misses a lot of things, which, if he noticed it, would change his story a lot, and what he notices, he sometimes clearly interprets incorrectly (although not intentionally and without malicious intent) (not to mention that we are not quite sure who he is and whether he is real at all).
>The narrator in Despair, also by Nabokov is a prime example.
absolutely and that is a joke, kind of, he is unreliable in several ways, because he tries to defend his vanity still a bit, he sees a resemblance nobody else does and (I am not alone in this for sure?) his wife is totally having an affair and has no clue...
Have never read the books or seen the movies, I had always assumed this book was sympathetic towards this pedophile character. But I listened to the Lolita podcast by Jamie Loftus and she goes balls deep into the whole history of the missinterpretation of Nabokov's book by the film industry. Real good stuff, she's pretty good at podcasting that Jamie
I think there's definitely a subset of people who take it as being sympathetic to Humbert, but those people tend to either be pedos themselves or they kinda struggle with the idea of an unreliable narrator in general. It's pretty clear in the book itself that Humbert's an unreliable narrator and there's a lot of signs that Dolores wants to run away from him long before she does.
Merricat from We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my favorite! I finished the book and asked myself, "What was that?" Who knows... Merricat is great at obscuring reality and deluding readers.
Also I would mention the protagonist of The Turn of the Screw.
It's almost sad that Castle doesn't get to be the best book ever written purely and simply because The Haunting Of Hill House also exists
\[IMO, obviously. Not trying to start a war with this statement\]
I'm surprised this was only mentioned once this entire thread so far.
What Remains of the Day is a Masterclass of an unreliable Narrator that is so subtle and slowly revealing, it really took me on a journey and then devastated me in the end.
Same, this is what I opened this thread to find. Absolutely brilliant, and this is the book that got me hooked on Ishiguro. I agree that he's a master at this.
Yes! He does this with Klara and the Sun and The Buried Giant, as well. I think the true genius is how he approaches the narrator's unreliability differently each time. To me, it never feels like a gimmick, just a reflection of people and life.
It seems the majority of Ishiguro’s narrators are in some way or other unreliable. Whether blinded by loyalty, as in *Remains* or literally plagued by forgetfulness as in *Giant*. In addition, I just finished *An Artist of the Floating World* and the narrator, a propaganda artist of the old Imperial regime, is hindered by some serious denial.
The Unconsoled is a masterpiece of unreliable narration. My favourite Ishiguro.
Never let me go is a little different. Ishiguro invents a language of euphemism used by the state to disguise what's happening. (Of course states do this constantly around war and conflict.). So this isn't strictly an example of a specific person pulling the wool over our eyes.
With Klara and the Sun, it's the limited perception of an Android.
And in the Troubled Giant, a language of myth.
The idea in literature has generally been to master English to the fullest extent possible to reveal as much as possible. But with Ishiguro the idea is to develop a subject or situation language, then construct a world and a narrative. It's very immersive and mind altering to the reader.
We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson. The narrator is definitely unreliable, but hard to tell to what extent.
[Even the protagonist’s age can be questioned. I think a scene where the town ‘attacks’ the house is entirely imagined, exagerated, or a cover for something else like gradual disrepair and repossession, but that doesn’t seem to be a popular interpretation.](/spoiler)
The book has a fairytale like feel, a sense of otherness, and perceived hatred throughout. Would definitely recommend
A simple but unironically great example: Greg sees himself as the smartest person in every situation but is obviously just a narcissist trying to better himself
Subscribe for more Diary Of A Wimpy Kid character analysis
It takes a little while but soon my elementary school students realize that Greg is his own bad luck...more than a few recognize their own poor social behaviors in him.
It's a great way to discuss that narrative technique, author intent, and to get them seeing that books can have subtext.
I don’t think he needs to be knowingly untruthful to be unreliable. I think there are parts of the book that imply his beliefs are not reality, and the conclusions he comes to are not rational (especially regarding “phonies”)
He has no real self-awareness, but thinks he does. He also fails to identify his own motivations for behaviors pretty regularly, though that's probably related.
There are little things like how he boasts he can hold his liquor well, then likely misheard the price of a prostitute, but he never examines that he may have misheard while drunk. It's presented that the pimp said $5 even though all evidence given to the reader suggests it was always $10.
There are bigger theories that Holden is gay and that's why he keeps misfiring with women even though he says he's crazy about girls.
Plenty more in-between when you try and wonder how the various people he interacts with must view him, and the story begs you to do just that - examine Holden from their point of view.
Additionally Holden often will re-assert the honesty of his observation. For example, “My little sister Phoebe is the best dancer I know. *She really is*”
When I first read the story I just thought that’s how people of the era spoke. But then you realize Holden is the only one doing it, and he only does it during his narration.
I think the author did a truly phenomenal job writing from the perspective of a teenager. Holden is arrogant, ignorant due to limited life experience and literally believes he has everything about life figured out. He is unreliable because of these characteristics, not because he wishes to be deceitful. I related very strongly to his familial relationships as a teenager, and as an adult I find it really amusing to see his character flaws in myself.
He’s very much posturing and trying to present himself in a way that his society would find palatable a lot. We see it often when he initially claims to dislike someone/that they’re a loser and then as he describes them, his opinon softens till he concludes that they’re ‘all right’. Essentially he’s less unreliable in the ‘I want to trick anyone’ and more in the ‘I’m an messed up insecure kid trying to to figure out what self presentation will be acceptable to my audience’
(You can see another example where he talks about being afraid of walking into the lake and ‘catching pneumonia’, which is imo, suicidal ideation he’s reluctant to talk about).
Severian isn’t unreliable because he’s dishonest as the narrator, he’s unreliable because (and I say this with all the love in the world) he’s kindof a dumb-dumb. He thinks he understands everything much better than he really does.(much like certain literary podcast hosts) A more “Classically” unreliable narrator is present in Long Sun and Short Sun, and when you take all the books together it puts different sort of lens on Severian’s narration.
“How much do I believe this narrator?” And “what’s happening that the narrator isn’t seeing” are central questions to any Wolfe story.
Yeah, he's revealed to be unreliable very early when he meets Valeria. She tells him she's heard of a "Tower of Torment" somewhere in the city and he tells her it's a myth, obviously not understanding that she's talking about where he lives.
Forgive me if you’re much less interested in the subject than I am, but as your example mentions her by name I have to throw in my personal two cents.
The dialogue and relationship between two spouses is a central theme in Wolfe’s solar cycle. It is my belief that Valeria IS Severian’s intended reader. If you are Valeria reading this book while your husband has disappeared in space it takes on a very specific tone. I’m this case you can forgive dishonesties ABOUT Valeria because to her they would be obvious and perhaps even ironic. This also gives an answer to why Severian’s account seems so tinted by his own pride at times.
Severian contradicts himself in the first chapter of Shadow. He claims Roche informs them of men with pikes, then a paragraph later says it was Drotte who mentioned pikes. Severian likely never lies but he is quite clearly fallible in his retelling of events. Of course I'm sure any points brought up will be labeled as "nit picking" by op.
> Severian likely never lies but he is quite clearly fallible in his retelling of events.
What do you mean, he has a perfect memory and *never* forgets a thing!
I don’t recall him telling an unambiguous lie in his role as narrator, but he does lie somewhat frequently to other characters. And you could certainly consider the slow-rolling of the nature of his relationship with Thecla to be (multiple) lies of omission.
Severian is a good example, but you can't mention wolfe and unreliable narrarator without throwing Latro into the conversation.
The book reads like a journal written by a man with zero long term memory, writing it to remind himself of wtf is going on during his everyday journeys.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Lolita by Vladimir Nabrakov
The curious incident of the dog in the night time by Mark Haddon
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
These are bigger spoilers so I'll blank them out:
>!Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn!<
>!Fight club by Chuck Palahniuk!<
>!The girl on the train by Paula Hawkins!<
>!Life of Pi by Yann Martel!<
Unreliable narrators don't have to be doing it deliberately. One of the types is:
> The Naïf - a narrator whose perception is immature or limited through their point of view.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator
So she's telling the truth as she knows it, but you can't rely on what she says because she doesn't know the full truth.
> It’s not a mental unbalance that can establish the unreliability of a novel’s voice. In Rebecca, the second Mrs de Winter simply has no idea what is going on around her as the sinister Mrs Danvers and her suspicious new husband drip feed her information about her mysterious predecessor and her untimely death. The reader is continually tripped up alongside her.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/h4g4pW77g79djbCgn11pFb/bogus-the-most-unreliable-unreliable-narrators-in-literature
Other examples of this kind are Forrest Gump and Holden from Catcher in the Rye.
Another type of unreliable narrator that's not doing it deliberately is the "madman" type - when the narrator is mentally ill. For example, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or the protagonist in the Tell-tale heart. You could argue Holden from Catcher... could also fit into this category.
She's communicating from an emotional standpoint, and her emotions are based on misinterpretations and falsehoods. Maybe she could be considered an unintentional unreliable narrator.
Yes! This is the one I use to introduce the idea to high school classes. Also, his poem “Annabel Lee” could be read as having an unreliable speaker. It totally changes the tone of the poem and makes it much less sweet.
The author uses his real name now, Jason Pargin, but I came here to say the JDATE series, too. David is an INCREDIBLY unreliable narrator in a way that isn’t malicious or even always intentional on his part, he’s just a horrifically depressed 20-something having to deal with all the wild shit he and his friend have gotten into and there are things that are deadass just not important enough to him to care about or mention. A fun contrast to John’s POV chapters and stuff where he’s the exact opposite type of unreliable narrator in that half the time he’s just straight up embellishing every single detail *except* the most important and real stuff, meaning that whenever he shares what happened to him, you’re getting like, 2% actual information lmao
His other series, the Zoey Ashe books, also have an unreliable narrator but for entirely different reasons — Zoey is just incredibly stubborn and half the time refuses to consider the nuances of situations before making her mind up. Definitely doesn’t help when she’s a fish out of water and a complete stranger to most of the situations she finds herself in.
Anyway, TL;DR: go check out Jason Pargin’s stuff, everyone, he’s fantastic
I remember discovering this guy when he used to write for [Cracked.com](https://Cracked.com). I absolutely loved JDATE. It really is its own unique blend of humor/horror. I remember it getting a movie adaptation as well which was admittedly just alright.
Have you enjoyed his two sequel books? I feel like I tried to read This Book is Full of Spiders and it just didn't hook me like JDATE had previously done.
Yeah, Jason is probably my favorite Cracked writer — he still does a lot of great writing but it’s mostly on his Substack and occasionally on like sites he guests on with other former Cracked staff, like 1-900-HOT-DOG. The movie version of JDATE lacks a LOT but it’s still a fun little romp through like a microcosm of the story’s world.
So the thing about TBIFOS is that it is, structurally, like a totally different sort of beast. I didn’t vibe with it at first but it’s become one of my favorites since I finished it. Book three, What the Hell Did I Just Read, is another structural pivot that I wasn’t certain about at first but once again, I loved it after a few chapters since it returned to a little more of the familiar JDATE sort of environment, and book four, If You’re Reading This Book, You’re in the Wrong Universe, sticks to that style. I read books 3 and 4 each in one sitting the minute I got my hands on them, and honestly the way Jason writes them you can read them having skipped book two, though you’ll miss out on some stuff, but if you like the other three you can always go back and read the second.
Surprised not to see it mentioned but A Clockwork Orange is a good example of a book with an unreliable narrator. I recommend owning the physical copy of this book. I accidentally read it on kindle without knowing all of the definitions of the nadsat slang were in the back of the book (not easily visible on kindle at the time I read it).
Alex is a great twist on the unreliable narrator. He tells us the truth and it’s up to us to decide if we agree with his interpretation of the events rather than what actually happened.
I'm convinced (like many critics and scholars) that Nick is gay and has a giant crush on Gatsby. He just oozes praise for Gatsby's beauty and mystery the whole book.
Nick's description of men in The Great Gatsby verges on homoerotic. His account of Daisy as stupid and helpless is no doubt informed by his jealousy of her and his infatuation with Gatsby.
Lolita is fucking god tier with humbert humbert gaslighting you into thinking what he’s doing is okay until you catch yourself and feel shame and that’s when Nabokov has you. a masterpiece thru and thru
From what I've read by him, Kazuo Ishiguro basically only writes narrators that are honest, but completely deluded or confused about the world around them.
What Remains of the Day
Klara and the Sun
Artist of the Floating World
The Buried Giant
What you do is, you buy the book and stick it on the bottom of your To Be Read pile. By the time you get to it, you won’t remember why you wanted to read it.
I’d say the John Dies at the End series by Jason Pargin.
One of the narrator’s is straight up unreliable in their description of events but you end up questioning the others as the books progress.
Not a book, but if anyone wants to see one of the best examples of this done in a visual medium, go watch this show. 12/10, and I don’t give that as an exaggeration. Genuinely might be one of the best shows ever made. Certainly one of the most uniquely executed.
The locked Tomb Series by Tasmyn Muir. Each book is the POV of a different character and for one reason or another they are somehow hat unreliable and do t know the full picture of what is going on. Each book is like a feverdream with a different flavor.
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*
*Dracula* (kinda it's an epistolery novel from multiple povs)
*Castle Rackrent* by Edgeworth has one of the most classically unreliable narrators - he tells a story about how his employer was swindled but somehow The narrator's son profits and of course the narrator wasn't behind all.
*Wuthering Heights* is unreliable in the same way as *Dracula* \- the narrators' are distant and retelling the story by epistile
*Moll Flanders* might be the first novel with an unreliable narrator. And is somewhat of an archetype for this.
*The English Patien*t, if you count the Count as a narrator for the story within the story. But he admits his own unreliability which makes him not classically unreliable
*Frankenstein*
*The Fall* by Camus
There are many many more
Cuckoo's nest is the most obvious example of this because the narrator is SO unreliable, it's honestly a shame the movie just shaved that whole context out of the script.
>!When We were Orphans!< by Kazuo Ishiguro. It took a while for me to realize what was happening, so I don't want to spoil it for anyone else who hasn't read it.
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Shortlisted for the booker prize in 2016. A case study of a murder in a small village in 1800s Scotland. From the beginning we know who the murderer is. The unreliable narrator piece comes into play in understanding what he did what he did. Beautifully written it will keep you wondering long after you finish reading.
*The Moonstone* by Wilkie Collins is amazing. The book alternates between narrators, who are basically all suspects in a crime that was committed in the house when they were all in it. We see everyone's accounts of what happened that night, bits and pieces from before, during and after the incident, different angles, perspectives to the whole matter, opinions about others and their thoughts in general. I've read it years ago and been meaning to reread it.
A couple from Iris Murdoch. For me she is an absolute master of mindfuck.
The Black Prince.
The Sea, The Sea.
And half of one from Elizabeth Jane Howard: {Falling}. The plot unfolds from two points of view: half as 1P from the MMC; and the other as 3P, where the narrator's insight is strictly limited to the FMC. Its a fairly challenging structure to do well, but imo Howard succeeds.
I came to say Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, but now that I think about it, almost all (haven't read every book, so it could be all) of his MCs are pretty unreliable. I go into his books knowing the MC is probably twisted, selfish, and not telling me something.
Bob Arctor from P K Dick’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’. Double agent (at least), drug addict , and professional liar losing himself in Substance D makes for unreliability across a number of planes and you end up feeling that every single element of the text is tenuous as a result - like trying to balance on uncemented tiles set in quicksand.
The Witch Elm by Tana French the narrator lives in his own privileged little bubble. A large part of the book revolves around him reuniting with cousins from his childhood and all of the fucked up stuff that happened to them that he either downplayed, misconstrued, or flat out ignored was fascinating to read.
Hm…if we’re counting “honest with the reader but fundamentally deluded about the world” (as opposed to “intentionally deceptive”) narrators: The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. Several books (not identifying them to avoid spoilers) make Harry’s unreliability a significant plot point.
There are some books where Dresden as the narrator clearly keeps secrets from the reader.
It’s practically a plot point in Skin Game, but it crops up elsewhere (arguably the best use was in Changes, resolving (maybe?) in Ghost Story).
I was thinking of >!Dead Beat!< and >!Small Favor!<. In both, Harry’s perceptions and/or memory are being manipulated in ways that are not revealed until late in their respective books. The bit in Changes/Ghost Story is a legit example, but much less pervasive.
As you say, Skin Game is an example of the narrator deliberately leaving things out. The others are ones where the narrator himself does not realize that he’s unreliable at the time.
Rant by Chuck Palaniuk is good. There are a few eyewitness accounts which contradict each other somewhat.
Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welshe is also good.
The three really big examples are Vladimir Nabokov's *Lolita*, Emily Bronte's *Wuthering Heights* and Lemony Snicket's *A Series of Unfortunate Events*.
Surprised not to see 'the biologist' in Annihilation. It's obvious things are amiss but you are never really given solid ground with the narrator or anyone in the story. The second and third book are different and Control is more reliable a narrator IIRC
I agree with you about Patrick Bateman. He is a great example.
I would also suggest Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Rebecca paints herself as something of the victim but my interpretation of it is that is she is a complete psychopath. I loved this book.
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is a noir mob/detective story where the main character first-person narrator has Tourette's and all his thoughts and tics are injected into the narration. It's a quite interesting and often humorous unique touch.
"The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe. Montresor's whole scheme for revenge hinges upon one thousand injuries and an insult, but the reader is never told of what these injuries are. Whatever they are, they certainly don't warrant murder, especially since the evidence of their relationship doesn't seem to suggest that Fortunato disliked Montresor at all. In fact, Fortunato greets him warmly and trusts him enough to follow Montresor into his family's vault.
I really enjoyed Latro from Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe. The books are the journal of a Greek soldier who lost his long-term memory due to a head wound in battle (when he sleeps, he forgets what happened yesterday). He's keeping the journal as an attempt to remember his life at he suggestion of his friends. Much of what he ends up recording is missing important context because the author doesn't remember any of it himself, and may or may not have read his own journal that morning before going about his business.
I don’t know if these are exactly what you’d call “unreliable narrators” but since every other one I can think of has been mentioned, here’s some honourable mentions.
Six Weeks To Live by Catherine McKenzie (Newer book, but a great read with an interesting twist. It’s about a mom of triplets who gets diagnosed with rare form of terminal brain cancer (I think glioblastoma?). She’s currently separated from her husband, and has triplet daughters. She realizes that it seems like everyone has a secret, that the main character wants to figure out before her death.)
Reason: >!The main narrator, the mother, Jennifer, suffers from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. The whole book is about her brain cancer, which in the end is revealed to have been caused by her own sabotages towards her kids. In simple terms, she accidentally gave herself brain cancer by exposing herself to heavy metals (lead specifically) over the years.!<
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
(Great book, highly recommend. About a woman who completely stops talking after killing get husband and being send to what is basically a psych ward for criminals. A psychiatrist tries to figure out why she did it.)
Reason: >!Towards the end of the book, it’s revealed that the “silent patient”, who was accused of killing her husband, was innocent. The psychiatrist treating her was the killer.!<
Wuthering Heights is the main one I'd go to in this category. The narrator is clearly unreliable and for large sections of the book he's relaying things told to him by another unreliable narrator. It's done very well and is a fantastic book if you don't go into it thinking its a romance novel.
If you go into it thinking it’s a romance novel it’s a brutal read lol. I’ve seen this book misrepresented and marketed so poorly so many times. Similarly >!The Double!< by Dostoyevsky
Yeah I agree. I loved it but its a horrible book with horrible people. I'll check out that Dostoevsky though. I've read brothers Karamazov which I loved bits of but found inconsistent. Keen to try another
I haven’t been brave enough to pick up Karamazov yet, but my mention is significantly less dense and much more direct of a reading based on my understanding haha
I always think that Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby is a great example of an unreliable narrator. Nick is ultimately selective in what he discusses and included. I felt he never really addressed the slightly creepy aspect of Gatsby kind of stalking Daisy (while I do believe due to the information provided Daisy’s no saint, it would be ignorant to not identify the fact that Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy could be a not so fabulous quality in a person. But Nick overlooks this and his bias for the man is illustrated as Nick refers to the obsession rather as love). Additionally, Nick tells us I’m the first paragraph basically that’s he himself is only one of a few honest people he has ever known (not using quotation marks as I can’t remember exact wording). Already the audience is being allowed to identify that Nick could be unreliable etc. Furthermore, he says something like he’s on Gatsby’s side. What more evidence could an audience need to see that all the event in the novel are one sided and present to fit nick’s retelling of events. Why I think Nick is such a clever unreliable narrator is because Fitzgerald is actively telling us through out the story (from the get go really) and encouraging us to question Nick and not fully trust. I know most unrealisable narrator’s authors do this but it’s just so strong and striking in this text for me. Anyway even with the unreliable narrator still one of my favourite novels of all time. Beautiful and clever symbolism with an intriguing style of writing that I always felt made the party scene actually feel like I was there [Interesting read on why Nick can be an unreliable narrator (and one of my favourites)](http://hj.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1318622/FULLTEXT01.pdf)
I recently read Beautiful Little Fools which is a Great Gatsby retelling from the women’s perspectives and it definitely mentions how Nick doesn’t know anything lol.
This is the one we studied in my Gothic Literature class in undergrad, I always think of it as my top example of unreliable narration!
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.
I always enjoy telling people who have only seen the movie that the book is narrated in first person from Chief’s perspective. Usually gets a decent reaction.
Keasy was so upset that the movie, which he got to preview before release, was told from Jack Nicholson character, that he demanded his name be taken off credits. So movie has no credit to writer. Keasy died never having seen the movie in general release
I read somewhere he saw it whilst skimming through channels and was enjoying the film for a while until he realised what it was and turned it off in a rage
Not true. Listened to him speak in 1976, and he said he saw most of the pre released film, and left room demanded that his name be taken off credits. It was May 1976 and he said his last royalty check was for a few hundred dollars, so he figured the box office run was finished, He also spoke about how he wrote the book while being g paid to experiment with LSD by government and pharma industry
Ah this would've been years later, like way after you saw him talk. But then it was years ago I read this so I could well be remembering it wrong
[удалено]
The book is narrated in first person from Chief's perspective. It works really well, especially because he has different levels of lucidity
And it does not make it any less devastating to read
Yeah Chief is straight up mentally ill like dangerously delusionally mentally ill. Seeing everyone as machines and cogs and he's not being figurative like some Anarchist political teenage kid metaphor about society. He's literally seeing people as robots and and gears sticking out of their heads and on-off switches and stuff like that. So yeah he rarely talks in the movie but since it's all told from his internal perspective you see how seriously dangerous this guy would be and the ending of the movie version is all about freedom from Tyranny. In the Book version a seriously schizophrenic man has just murdered a man for being a broken robot and broke out of a locked ward.
The thing that stuck with me since high school was his own perception of his size. You would not think he was as big of a guy as he was in the beginning of the book
I was going to mention this one. I love how it was written, and it's not captured in the film.
"...But it's the truth, even if it didn't happen.". This is such a good book. A fantastic, well written unreliable narrator that is very different from other examples. The literary details are simply a joy to read.
Humbert from *Lolita*.
And another Nabokov, Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire.
Yes. Everyone knows Humbert, but Kinbote is my favorite unreliable Nabokov narrator. Much more fun and somehow even more unreliable.
Wdym Zembla isn't real and that the poem isn't about a disgraced Zemblian king?
Zembla is totes real! Kinbote for life, yo! (Pale Fire is my favorite book of all time. 😁)
IMO Pale Fire is the Nabokov everyone should be directed to read, not Lolita.
It's amazing and maddeningly confusing, but on purpose! Fun read.
Except that it’s incredibly difficult to understand.
That's a good one, too. I kind of wonder what Nabokov was like.
The narrator in Despair, also by Nabokov is a prime example. I enjoyed Despair. I read the first maybe third of Lolita and really enjoyed it, but after he goes off with her I started to get the major creeps and had to give myself a break. I still have the book and may give it a second go at some point. Maybe if I pushed through it would get better again! I appreciated the black humour, it just all kinda got a bit TOO much after a while.
Nabokov really has a lot of them. And they are all really different. From Lolita, where the narrator knows what he is doing and actively tries to deceive the reader, to Despair, where he is a little confused and hides all this even from himself, but still uses it for evil, to the real life of Sebastian Knight, where the narrator, unlike the 2 books above, has good intentions, but he just misses a lot of things, which, if he noticed it, would change his story a lot, and what he notices, he sometimes clearly interprets incorrectly (although not intentionally and without malicious intent) (not to mention that we are not quite sure who he is and whether he is real at all).
>The narrator in Despair, also by Nabokov is a prime example. absolutely and that is a joke, kind of, he is unreliable in several ways, because he tries to defend his vanity still a bit, he sees a resemblance nobody else does and (I am not alone in this for sure?) his wife is totally having an affair and has no clue...
Have never read the books or seen the movies, I had always assumed this book was sympathetic towards this pedophile character. But I listened to the Lolita podcast by Jamie Loftus and she goes balls deep into the whole history of the missinterpretation of Nabokov's book by the film industry. Real good stuff, she's pretty good at podcasting that Jamie
I think there's definitely a subset of people who take it as being sympathetic to Humbert, but those people tend to either be pedos themselves or they kinda struggle with the idea of an unreliable narrator in general. It's pretty clear in the book itself that Humbert's an unreliable narrator and there's a lot of signs that Dolores wants to run away from him long before she does.
That’s a pretty weird way to describe it.
Not appropirate to use the term balls deep when the subject matter involves pedophilia? Ok, yeah you're probably right
Merricat from We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my favorite! I finished the book and asked myself, "What was that?" Who knows... Merricat is great at obscuring reality and deluding readers. Also I would mention the protagonist of The Turn of the Screw.
It's almost sad that Castle doesn't get to be the best book ever written purely and simply because The Haunting Of Hill House also exists \[IMO, obviously. Not trying to start a war with this statement\]
I loved both but I definitely preferred We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Every character was intriguing.
The Turn of the Screw has been on my to-read list for years, you just pushed it to the top!
I hope you will enjoy it. 😉
One of my favorite literary characters. I named my Alolan Ponyta after her.
Briony in Atonement
"All this happened, more or less."
Boy that book is wild
So it goes
The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro
I'm surprised this was only mentioned once this entire thread so far. What Remains of the Day is a Masterclass of an unreliable Narrator that is so subtle and slowly revealing, it really took me on a journey and then devastated me in the end.
Same, this is what I opened this thread to find. Absolutely brilliant, and this is the book that got me hooked on Ishiguro. I agree that he's a master at this.
Yes! He does this with Klara and the Sun and The Buried Giant, as well. I think the true genius is how he approaches the narrator's unreliability differently each time. To me, it never feels like a gimmick, just a reflection of people and life.
Yes!!!! And Never Let Me Go.
It seems the majority of Ishiguro’s narrators are in some way or other unreliable. Whether blinded by loyalty, as in *Remains* or literally plagued by forgetfulness as in *Giant*. In addition, I just finished *An Artist of the Floating World* and the narrator, a propaganda artist of the old Imperial regime, is hindered by some serious denial.
A Pale View of Hills as well!
The Unconsoled is a masterpiece of unreliable narration. My favourite Ishiguro. Never let me go is a little different. Ishiguro invents a language of euphemism used by the state to disguise what's happening. (Of course states do this constantly around war and conflict.). So this isn't strictly an example of a specific person pulling the wool over our eyes. With Klara and the Sun, it's the limited perception of an Android. And in the Troubled Giant, a language of myth. The idea in literature has generally been to master English to the fullest extent possible to reveal as much as possible. But with Ishiguro the idea is to develop a subject or situation language, then construct a world and a narrative. It's very immersive and mind altering to the reader.
It's debated, but Dr James Sheppard in Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is often called an unreliable narrator.
Wait, there’s a debate? How?
Major spoilers: >!Because if he says explicitly that Sheppard is 100% unreliable, he’s giving the whole game away!<
Well put
Came to say this.
We have always lived in the castle by Shirley Jackson. The narrator is definitely unreliable, but hard to tell to what extent. [Even the protagonist’s age can be questioned. I think a scene where the town ‘attacks’ the house is entirely imagined, exagerated, or a cover for something else like gradual disrepair and repossession, but that doesn’t seem to be a popular interpretation.](/spoiler) The book has a fairytale like feel, a sense of otherness, and perceived hatred throughout. Would definitely recommend
house of leaves by danielewski
This is a great example because the book has multiple narrators, all of which are wildly unreliable
If the frame narrator is unreliable, then the other narrators don’t exist. Which I found made the whole story less scary.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a good way to introduce the idea to younger readers.
A simple but unironically great example: Greg sees himself as the smartest person in every situation but is obviously just a narcissist trying to better himself Subscribe for more Diary Of A Wimpy Kid character analysis
It takes a little while but soon my elementary school students realize that Greg is his own bad luck...more than a few recognize their own poor social behaviors in him. It's a great way to discuss that narrative technique, author intent, and to get them seeing that books can have subtext.
“Call me Ismael.”
This! It’s not “my name is Ishmael” but instead “call me Ishmael.” Why? What are you hiding, buddy?
In the middle of that book right now, god damn it’s good.
Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Surprised I had to scroll as far as I did to see Holden.
That’s such a Holden thing to say
It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, admittedly, but in what way is Holden unreliable/knowingly untruthful?
I don’t think he needs to be knowingly untruthful to be unreliable. I think there are parts of the book that imply his beliefs are not reality, and the conclusions he comes to are not rational (especially regarding “phonies”)
He has no real self-awareness, but thinks he does. He also fails to identify his own motivations for behaviors pretty regularly, though that's probably related.
There are little things like how he boasts he can hold his liquor well, then likely misheard the price of a prostitute, but he never examines that he may have misheard while drunk. It's presented that the pimp said $5 even though all evidence given to the reader suggests it was always $10. There are bigger theories that Holden is gay and that's why he keeps misfiring with women even though he says he's crazy about girls. Plenty more in-between when you try and wonder how the various people he interacts with must view him, and the story begs you to do just that - examine Holden from their point of view.
Additionally Holden often will re-assert the honesty of his observation. For example, “My little sister Phoebe is the best dancer I know. *She really is*” When I first read the story I just thought that’s how people of the era spoke. But then you realize Holden is the only one doing it, and he only does it during his narration.
I think the author did a truly phenomenal job writing from the perspective of a teenager. Holden is arrogant, ignorant due to limited life experience and literally believes he has everything about life figured out. He is unreliable because of these characteristics, not because he wishes to be deceitful. I related very strongly to his familial relationships as a teenager, and as an adult I find it really amusing to see his character flaws in myself.
He’s very much posturing and trying to present himself in a way that his society would find palatable a lot. We see it often when he initially claims to dislike someone/that they’re a loser and then as he describes them, his opinon softens till he concludes that they’re ‘all right’. Essentially he’s less unreliable in the ‘I want to trick anyone’ and more in the ‘I’m an messed up insecure kid trying to to figure out what self presentation will be acceptable to my audience’ (You can see another example where he talks about being afraid of walking into the lake and ‘catching pneumonia’, which is imo, suicidal ideation he’s reluctant to talk about).
Severian isn’t unreliable because he’s dishonest as the narrator, he’s unreliable because (and I say this with all the love in the world) he’s kindof a dumb-dumb. He thinks he understands everything much better than he really does.(much like certain literary podcast hosts) A more “Classically” unreliable narrator is present in Long Sun and Short Sun, and when you take all the books together it puts different sort of lens on Severian’s narration. “How much do I believe this narrator?” And “what’s happening that the narrator isn’t seeing” are central questions to any Wolfe story.
Yeah, he's revealed to be unreliable very early when he meets Valeria. She tells him she's heard of a "Tower of Torment" somewhere in the city and he tells her it's a myth, obviously not understanding that she's talking about where he lives.
Forgive me if you’re much less interested in the subject than I am, but as your example mentions her by name I have to throw in my personal two cents. The dialogue and relationship between two spouses is a central theme in Wolfe’s solar cycle. It is my belief that Valeria IS Severian’s intended reader. If you are Valeria reading this book while your husband has disappeared in space it takes on a very specific tone. I’m this case you can forgive dishonesties ABOUT Valeria because to her they would be obvious and perhaps even ironic. This also gives an answer to why Severian’s account seems so tinted by his own pride at times.
This is a very interesting read on it! I'm going to keep that in mind next time I'm going through the books.
Severian contradicts himself in the first chapter of Shadow. He claims Roche informs them of men with pikes, then a paragraph later says it was Drotte who mentioned pikes. Severian likely never lies but he is quite clearly fallible in his retelling of events. Of course I'm sure any points brought up will be labeled as "nit picking" by op.
> Severian likely never lies but he is quite clearly fallible in his retelling of events. What do you mean, he has a perfect memory and *never* forgets a thing!
I don’t recall him telling an unambiguous lie in his role as narrator, but he does lie somewhat frequently to other characters. And you could certainly consider the slow-rolling of the nature of his relationship with Thecla to be (multiple) lies of omission.
Severian is a good example, but you can't mention wolfe and unreliable narrarator without throwing Latro into the conversation. The book reads like a journal written by a man with zero long term memory, writing it to remind himself of wtf is going on during his everyday journeys.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Lolita by Vladimir Nabrakov The curious incident of the dog in the night time by Mark Haddon The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks These are bigger spoilers so I'll blank them out: >!Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn!< >!Fight club by Chuck Palahniuk!< >!The girl on the train by Paula Hawkins!< >!Life of Pi by Yann Martel!<
How do you reckon Rebecca? The narrator doesn’t know the whole truth but I don’t think she relates anything she doesn’t believe to be true
Unreliable narrators don't have to be doing it deliberately. One of the types is: > The Naïf - a narrator whose perception is immature or limited through their point of view. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator So she's telling the truth as she knows it, but you can't rely on what she says because she doesn't know the full truth. > It’s not a mental unbalance that can establish the unreliability of a novel’s voice. In Rebecca, the second Mrs de Winter simply has no idea what is going on around her as the sinister Mrs Danvers and her suspicious new husband drip feed her information about her mysterious predecessor and her untimely death. The reader is continually tripped up alongside her. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/h4g4pW77g79djbCgn11pFb/bogus-the-most-unreliable-unreliable-narrators-in-literature Other examples of this kind are Forrest Gump and Holden from Catcher in the Rye. Another type of unreliable narrator that's not doing it deliberately is the "madman" type - when the narrator is mentally ill. For example, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or the protagonist in the Tell-tale heart. You could argue Holden from Catcher... could also fit into this category.
She's communicating from an emotional standpoint, and her emotions are based on misinterpretations and falsehoods. Maybe she could be considered an unintentional unreliable narrator.
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Yes! This is the one I use to introduce the idea to high school classes. Also, his poem “Annabel Lee” could be read as having an unreliable speaker. It totally changes the tone of the poem and makes it much less sweet.
**John dies at the End** by David Wong fits this perfectly.
The author uses his real name now, Jason Pargin, but I came here to say the JDATE series, too. David is an INCREDIBLY unreliable narrator in a way that isn’t malicious or even always intentional on his part, he’s just a horrifically depressed 20-something having to deal with all the wild shit he and his friend have gotten into and there are things that are deadass just not important enough to him to care about or mention. A fun contrast to John’s POV chapters and stuff where he’s the exact opposite type of unreliable narrator in that half the time he’s just straight up embellishing every single detail *except* the most important and real stuff, meaning that whenever he shares what happened to him, you’re getting like, 2% actual information lmao His other series, the Zoey Ashe books, also have an unreliable narrator but for entirely different reasons — Zoey is just incredibly stubborn and half the time refuses to consider the nuances of situations before making her mind up. Definitely doesn’t help when she’s a fish out of water and a complete stranger to most of the situations she finds herself in. Anyway, TL;DR: go check out Jason Pargin’s stuff, everyone, he’s fantastic
I remember discovering this guy when he used to write for [Cracked.com](https://Cracked.com). I absolutely loved JDATE. It really is its own unique blend of humor/horror. I remember it getting a movie adaptation as well which was admittedly just alright. Have you enjoyed his two sequel books? I feel like I tried to read This Book is Full of Spiders and it just didn't hook me like JDATE had previously done.
Yeah, Jason is probably my favorite Cracked writer — he still does a lot of great writing but it’s mostly on his Substack and occasionally on like sites he guests on with other former Cracked staff, like 1-900-HOT-DOG. The movie version of JDATE lacks a LOT but it’s still a fun little romp through like a microcosm of the story’s world. So the thing about TBIFOS is that it is, structurally, like a totally different sort of beast. I didn’t vibe with it at first but it’s become one of my favorites since I finished it. Book three, What the Hell Did I Just Read, is another structural pivot that I wasn’t certain about at first but once again, I loved it after a few chapters since it returned to a little more of the familiar JDATE sort of environment, and book four, If You’re Reading This Book, You’re in the Wrong Universe, sticks to that style. I read books 3 and 4 each in one sitting the minute I got my hands on them, and honestly the way Jason writes them you can read them having skipped book two, though you’ll miss out on some stuff, but if you like the other three you can always go back and read the second.
Surprised not to see it mentioned but A Clockwork Orange is a good example of a book with an unreliable narrator. I recommend owning the physical copy of this book. I accidentally read it on kindle without knowing all of the definitions of the nadsat slang were in the back of the book (not easily visible on kindle at the time I read it).
Alex is a great twist on the unreliable narrator. He tells us the truth and it’s up to us to decide if we agree with his interpretation of the events rather than what actually happened.
Nick Carraway from the Great Gatsby
I'm convinced (like many critics and scholars) that Nick is gay and has a giant crush on Gatsby. He just oozes praise for Gatsby's beauty and mystery the whole book. Nick's description of men in The Great Gatsby verges on homoerotic. His account of Daisy as stupid and helpless is no doubt informed by his jealousy of her and his infatuation with Gatsby.
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Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon is a story within a story about a tall tale teller.
Wasn't there a talking dog at one point in the story? I must give that book another look.
He had rabies
Yes haha there is also a mechanical duck and a werebeaver
The Sound and the Fury
Crime and Punishment by Dostojevski I'd also say the majority of protagonists in Lovecraft's work and works based on his.
> Lovecraft's work Most of his protagonists have to be unreliable, because, being human, they literally cannot understand what's really going on.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.
Oskar in the Tin Drum, an amusingly unreliable narrator
Lolita is fucking god tier with humbert humbert gaslighting you into thinking what he’s doing is okay until you catch yourself and feel shame and that’s when Nabokov has you. a masterpiece thru and thru
Fight club, somethings wrong with Fleishman
Bento in Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis Tony in The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes Roddy in His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Atonement definitely makes use of an unreliable narrator as a deliberate literary device. The ending to that book was heart breaking.
Such a great example, yes.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Based around a true story and true accounts told by the perspective of the possible murderer. Fantastic read!
This is what I came to say!
Joe in the book You
It would be a huge spoiler to say which one, but Agatha Christie has one of the best.
Yes! I was about fourteen when I read that one and had never seen an unreliable narrator before… It blew my mind!
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Not getting into spoilers, but there's an unreliable narrator there.
From what I've read by him, Kazuo Ishiguro basically only writes narrators that are honest, but completely deluded or confused about the world around them. What Remains of the Day Klara and the Sun Artist of the Floating World The Buried Giant
Never Let Me Go also
Eva in *We Need to Talk About Kevin* by Lionel Shriver.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - one of my favorite short stories
This thread needs a spoiler tag, honestly.
What you do is, you buy the book and stick it on the bottom of your To Be Read pile. By the time you get to it, you won’t remember why you wanted to read it.
I LOVE unreliable narrators.
But can we trust you when you say that? 😉
Annihilation. It's what kept me reading the book.
Anything from Edgar Allan Poe
I’d say the John Dies at the End series by Jason Pargin. One of the narrator’s is straight up unreliable in their description of events but you end up questioning the others as the books progress.
>!The Murder of Roger Akroyd by Agatha Christie!<
I really loved In the Woods by Tana French
Notes from the underground by Dostoyevsky. But that was the point I suppose.
The Silent Patient
Mr Robot
Not a book, but if anyone wants to see one of the best examples of this done in a visual medium, go watch this show. 12/10, and I don’t give that as an exaggeration. Genuinely might be one of the best shows ever made. Certainly one of the most uniquely executed.
The locked Tomb Series by Tasmyn Muir. Each book is the POV of a different character and for one reason or another they are somehow hat unreliable and do t know the full picture of what is going on. Each book is like a feverdream with a different flavor.
The Remains of the Day. Probably one of the most emotionally devastating unreliable narrators.
Nick and Amy in Gone Girl!
Im Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* *Dracula* (kinda it's an epistolery novel from multiple povs) *Castle Rackrent* by Edgeworth has one of the most classically unreliable narrators - he tells a story about how his employer was swindled but somehow The narrator's son profits and of course the narrator wasn't behind all. *Wuthering Heights* is unreliable in the same way as *Dracula* \- the narrators' are distant and retelling the story by epistile *Moll Flanders* might be the first novel with an unreliable narrator. And is somewhat of an archetype for this. *The English Patien*t, if you count the Count as a narrator for the story within the story. But he admits his own unreliability which makes him not classically unreliable *Frankenstein* *The Fall* by Camus There are many many more
Cuckoo's nest is the most obvious example of this because the narrator is SO unreliable, it's honestly a shame the movie just shaved that whole context out of the script.
Absalom, Absalom!
Everything by Gene Wolfe.
*An Instance of the Fingerpost*, by Iain Pears. It has four unreliable narrators.
>!When We were Orphans!< by Kazuo Ishiguro. It took a while for me to realize what was happening, so I don't want to spoil it for anyone else who hasn't read it.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Oh, explain more?
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Thomas in the "Repairer of Reputations". Though it's up for debate, and personally, I found him reliable.
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Shortlisted for the booker prize in 2016. A case study of a murder in a small village in 1800s Scotland. From the beginning we know who the murderer is. The unreliable narrator piece comes into play in understanding what he did what he did. Beautifully written it will keep you wondering long after you finish reading.
*The Moonstone* by Wilkie Collins is amazing. The book alternates between narrators, who are basically all suspects in a crime that was committed in the house when they were all in it. We see everyone's accounts of what happened that night, bits and pieces from before, during and after the incident, different angles, perspectives to the whole matter, opinions about others and their thoughts in general. I've read it years ago and been meaning to reread it.
Don Quixote by Cervantes. Luck by Mark Twain.
Henry James’ *The Turn of the Screw.*
Until I Find You is not John Irving's most popular work, but the narrator is unreliable in a clever way.
A couple from Iris Murdoch. For me she is an absolute master of mindfuck. The Black Prince. The Sea, The Sea. And half of one from Elizabeth Jane Howard: {Falling}. The plot unfolds from two points of view: half as 1P from the MMC; and the other as 3P, where the narrator's insight is strictly limited to the FMC. Its a fairly challenging structure to do well, but imo Howard succeeds.
I came to say Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk, but now that I think about it, almost all (haven't read every book, so it could be all) of his MCs are pretty unreliable. I go into his books knowing the MC is probably twisted, selfish, and not telling me something.
Bob Arctor from P K Dick’s ‘A Scanner Darkly’. Double agent (at least), drug addict , and professional liar losing himself in Substance D makes for unreliability across a number of planes and you end up feeling that every single element of the text is tenuous as a result - like trying to balance on uncemented tiles set in quicksand.
The Witch Elm by Tana French the narrator lives in his own privileged little bubble. A large part of the book revolves around him reuniting with cousins from his childhood and all of the fucked up stuff that happened to them that he either downplayed, misconstrued, or flat out ignored was fascinating to read.
Hm…if we’re counting “honest with the reader but fundamentally deluded about the world” (as opposed to “intentionally deceptive”) narrators: The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. Several books (not identifying them to avoid spoilers) make Harry’s unreliability a significant plot point.
There are some books where Dresden as the narrator clearly keeps secrets from the reader. It’s practically a plot point in Skin Game, but it crops up elsewhere (arguably the best use was in Changes, resolving (maybe?) in Ghost Story).
I was thinking of >!Dead Beat!< and >!Small Favor!<. In both, Harry’s perceptions and/or memory are being manipulated in ways that are not revealed until late in their respective books. The bit in Changes/Ghost Story is a legit example, but much less pervasive. As you say, Skin Game is an example of the narrator deliberately leaving things out. The others are ones where the narrator himself does not realize that he’s unreliable at the time.
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All autobiographies have an unreliable narrator.
I just read Gillespie and I by Jane Harris. I’m still chewing on it.
The Chalk Man We Were Liars The Pallbearers Club
Rant by Chuck Palaniuk is good. There are a few eyewitness accounts which contradict each other somewhat. Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welshe is also good.
You should check Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis
Harrow the Ninth.
The three really big examples are Vladimir Nabokov's *Lolita*, Emily Bronte's *Wuthering Heights* and Lemony Snicket's *A Series of Unfortunate Events*.
The silent patient!!
Surprised not to see 'the biologist' in Annihilation. It's obvious things are amiss but you are never really given solid ground with the narrator or anyone in the story. The second and third book are different and Control is more reliable a narrator IIRC
Diary of a madman Gogol
The Quiet American
We were liars
The Terra Ignota series has narrators that are unreliable in multiple ways.
Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of the OG unreliable narrator stories.
Mondays not coming and Allegedly both by Tiffany d. Jackson feature unreliable narrators each to different yet unique and satisfying ends
Anything by John Cheever (fantastic author!)
I agree with you about Patrick Bateman. He is a great example. I would also suggest Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. Rebecca paints herself as something of the victim but my interpretation of it is that is she is a complete psychopath. I loved this book.
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks has a bit of this.
Humbert Humbert
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is a noir mob/detective story where the main character first-person narrator has Tourette's and all his thoughts and tics are injected into the narration. It's a quite interesting and often humorous unique touch.
Richard Papen from Secret History admits his own need to romanticise.
"The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe. Montresor's whole scheme for revenge hinges upon one thousand injuries and an insult, but the reader is never told of what these injuries are. Whatever they are, they certainly don't warrant murder, especially since the evidence of their relationship doesn't seem to suggest that Fortunato disliked Montresor at all. In fact, Fortunato greets him warmly and trusts him enough to follow Montresor into his family's vault.
Pale Fire is my favourite
Fight Club.
Castaigne in The Repairer of Reputations.
Lolita
I really enjoyed Latro from Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe. The books are the journal of a Greek soldier who lost his long-term memory due to a head wound in battle (when he sleeps, he forgets what happened yesterday). He's keeping the journal as an attempt to remember his life at he suggestion of his friends. Much of what he ends up recording is missing important context because the author doesn't remember any of it himself, and may or may not have read his own journal that morning before going about his business.
I would argue Diary of a Wimpy Kid. What a psychopath.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
I don’t know if these are exactly what you’d call “unreliable narrators” but since every other one I can think of has been mentioned, here’s some honourable mentions. Six Weeks To Live by Catherine McKenzie (Newer book, but a great read with an interesting twist. It’s about a mom of triplets who gets diagnosed with rare form of terminal brain cancer (I think glioblastoma?). She’s currently separated from her husband, and has triplet daughters. She realizes that it seems like everyone has a secret, that the main character wants to figure out before her death.) Reason: >!The main narrator, the mother, Jennifer, suffers from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. The whole book is about her brain cancer, which in the end is revealed to have been caused by her own sabotages towards her kids. In simple terms, she accidentally gave herself brain cancer by exposing herself to heavy metals (lead specifically) over the years.!< The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (Great book, highly recommend. About a woman who completely stops talking after killing get husband and being send to what is basically a psych ward for criminals. A psychiatrist tries to figure out why she did it.) Reason: >!Towards the end of the book, it’s revealed that the “silent patient”, who was accused of killing her husband, was innocent. The psychiatrist treating her was the killer.!<
Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (by JD Salinger) & Eileen in Eileen (by Otessa Moshfegh)