While you may find an unreliable narrator who's written in the second-person or third-person point of view, this is generally rare. Unreliable narrators can make for intriguing, complex characters: depending on the narrator’s motivation for clouding the truth, readers may also feel more compelled to keep reading to figure out why the narrator is hiding things.įinally, all unreliable narrators are first-person: they live in the world of the story and will have an inherent bias or perhaps even an agenda. An unreliable narrator can create a lot of grey areas and blur the lines of reality, allowing us to come to our own conclusions.įallible storytellers can also create tension by keeping readers on their toes - wondering if there’s more under the surface, and reading between the lines to decipher what that is. If each person subjectively remembers something that happened, how do we know who is right? "Indeed, many writers have used the Rashomon Effect to tell stories from multiple first-person perspectives - leaving readers to determine whose record is most believable." (Check out As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner for an example).įor the purpose of this article, however, we will refer to narrators who are purposefully unreliable for a specific narrative function.Ĭlick to tweet! Literary function of an unreliable narratorįiction that makes us question our own perceptions can be powerful. The “ Rashomon Effect” tells us that our subjective perceptions prohibit us from ever having a totally clear memory of past events. In a sense, no, there aren’t any 100% completely reliable narrators. This discussion can lead us down a proverbial rabbit hole. For example, "The Tell-Tale Heart" published by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843 utilizes this storytelling tool, as does Wuthering Heights, published in 1847.īut wait, is any narrator really reliable? Booth in his 1961 book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, it’s a literary device that writers have been putting to good use for much longer than the past 80 years. While the term “unreliable narrator” was first coined by literary critic Wayne C.
There are different types of unreliable narrators (more on that later), and the presence of one can be revealed to readers in varying ways - sometimes immediately, sometimes gradually, and sometimes later in the story when a plot twist leaves us wondering if we’ve maybe been a little too trusting. In literature, an unreliable narrator is a character who tells a story with a lack of credibility.
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