Unreliable narrator
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In literature and film, an unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability or powerful bias. 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.
Works featuring unreliable narrators
Works of fiction featuring unreliable narrators:
- Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
- Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro
- Paddy Chayefsky's Altered States, (novel and film)
- Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho
- Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (Miles Coverdale)
- Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun and the vast majority of his other work.
- J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter
- Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno
- John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure
- Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club
- Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon
- Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
- Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Humbert Humbert)
- Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground
- Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Charles Kinbote)
- Marian Keyes' Rachel's Holiday
- Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day
- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat", "The Cask of Amontillado", and perhaps "Ligeia"
- John Knowles's "A Separate Peace"
- Lu Xun's A True Story of Ah Q
- Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (the unnamed governess)
- Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca
- Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint
- Emily Brontė's Wuthering Heights
Films told from an unreliable point-of-view (or points-of-view):
- David Fincher's Fight Club
- Mary Harron's American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
- The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (The Stranger)
- Alexander Payne's Election
- Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder
- Christopher Nolan's Memento (Leonard Shelby)
- Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, based on Akutagawa Ryunosuke's "In a Grove" and "Rashomon"
- Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (James Cole), Brazil (Sam Lowry), and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Munchausen)
- Christopher McQuarrie's The Usual Suspects (Verbal Kint)