Unreliable narrator

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In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction [1]) is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability, or a powerful bias, or else simply by a lack of knowledge. One of the earliest known examples of unreliable narration is Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In the Merchant's Tale, for instance, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, applies a misogynistic slant to much of his tale.

Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience makes them inherently unreliable. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; in contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.

Many have suggested that all first-person narration, and indeed narration generally, is inescapably unreliable.

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Works featuring unreliable narrators

Works of fiction featuring unreliable narrators:

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

Video games that include unreliable narrators:

Musical artists who are well known for unreliable narration:

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