Meaning of unreliable narrator | Babel Free

Definitions

A narrating character or storyteller in a literary or other artistic work (such as a film, novel, play, or song) who provides conflicting, inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise questionable information to the audience or reader.

Equivalents

Examples

“[page 158] For practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator. […] [page 159] Unreliable narrators thus differ markedly depending on how far and in what direction they depart from the author's norms; […]”

“The Priest also places a moral barrier between himself and his tale by establishing himself as an "unreliable narrator" capable of deception and irony. Thus, through his habit of speaking equivocally, he can disavow responsibility for his frequently provocative words.”

“As a young and inexperienced observer, Meadows represents the unreliable narrator whose views are sometimes wrong; but he learns from his mistakes and grows in perceptiveness and wisdom as the novel progresses.”

“The unreliable narrator demonstrates how the spirit of the times colours the work of storytellers, and how they in turn help to shape that spirit. We can find unreliable narrators in the books of Agatha Christie and William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Mordecai Richler – and hundreds of other writers. It's one of the emblematic literary devices of the century.”

“[…] Patrick, for all his brutal truth telling, is an unreliable narrator. You see, he is mad—so mad, he probably committed the murders in his head. Which still makes him one sick yuppie.”

“[F]or the rest of the book [Sebastian] Faulks gets to indulge in the unreliable-narrator game of cunning ellipses and selective, gradual revelation.”

“Simply put, an unreliable narrator is one whose version of events runs counter to the story's true actions and to readers' interpretation of those events. Unreliable narrators are connivers, lunatics, and innocents, but what they all have in common is their unreliability as storytellers, their rejection or ignorance of the truth. Unreliable narrators equivocate, lie, fib, avoid, defend, divert, create decoys, flee, impersonate, change costumes, remake themselves and their origins, and distort the other characters' actions and intentions, breaking the rules in order to ensure readers' sympathy.”

“Omnipedia is an unreliable narrator – we are encouraged to look at the edit logs of each wiki page, to see what information is new and what has been deleted.”

CEFR level