Unreliable narrator
Narratology & storytellingA narrator whose account can't be trusted — through lies, blindness, madness or self-interest — and whom the text betrays.
Example
A narrator swears he isn't jealous — and logs every smile his wife gives anyone else.
The unreliable narrator tells a story the reader has reasons to doubt: lying, self-deceiving, forgetting, embellishing, or failing to understand what they report. The essence is the double mechanism: the text must carry their version and leak the clues that contradict it.
From Nabokov's Humbert Humbert to Ishiguro's butler, unreliability is no twist gimmick: it's a moral device, putting the reader in the judge's seat and turning reading into an inquiry. The classic execution error is revealing the deception in an unprepared final reversal — a reread must always be able to find the clues.
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