Unreliable narrator

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In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction<ref>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1824513,00.html</ref>) is a literary device in which the credibility of the narrator, either first-person or third-person, is seriously compromised. This unreliability can be due to psychological instability or other disability, a powerful bias, a lack of knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the reader/audience. The nature of the narrator is sometimes immediately clear, though a more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story's end, resulting in a significant realignment of the point of view from which the reader/audience thought they had been experiencing the story. Sometimes the narrator's unreliability is only hinted at, either at the beginning or end of the story, resulting in ambiguity in the reader/audience's mind as to how the story should be interpreted.

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. Huck even accuses his author, "Mr. Mark Twain," of having stretched the truth in the previous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, creating an early example of a fourth-wall breach.

Another class of unreliable narrator is one who, as a participant in the story, intentionally attempts to deceive the audience as well as the other characters. One of the earliest examples is Agatha Christie's detective novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. A more recent example is the film The Usual Suspects.

Psychologically impaired narrators describe the world as they perceive it. In the film, Bubba Ho-tep, the main character Elvis (or an impersonator Sebastian Haff) appears to suffer from Alzheimers, making it unclear how much of his story is real. Another example is Benjy in The Sound and the Fury.

Sometimes it is no particular character in the story but the third-person narrator who deceives the audience into believing something untrue about the characters, not revealed until the story's end. An early example is Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". Another example is the film Fallen and a more recent example is the film The Sixth Sense.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote many stories featuring first-person narrators whose sanity had been frayed by exposure to horror, making them certainly unreliable. In addition, Lovecraft often employed a technique whereby the narrator would continually deny supernatural explanations for witnessed events, until the very end of the story when they would ultimately be forced to confront a horrible truth (which the reader had probably already guessed). Good examples are "Pickman's Model" and "Cool Air".