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What are your favorite books with an unreliable narrator?
I haven’t read many books that explore unreliable narrators. I would love some recommendations.
I haven’t read many books that explore unreliable narrators. I would love some recommendations.
I'm not OP, but I can help. The "unbelievable narrator" is a storytelling technique. It spans genres, but works particular well for certain ones.
The technique is when the author tells the story through a narrator (whether a character or a detached narrator) that isn't reliable. Imagine a story about somebody who is experiencing a psychotic break. We see through their eyes what is happening, but they aren't rational so what they (and we) see isn't what's actually happening in the story's universe.
A lot of times the unreliable narration isn't obvious until it builds into a reveal, where we find out that certain parts of the story were not what we were shown. Other times the author gives us hints through external events that the narrator's perspective is not clear, and it's more of a slow realization than a reveal.
There are a lot of good examples of it in popular films and books but I can't name any of them without spoiling them. I guess one good example, where the unreliability of the narrator is clear from the start, is Memento. Amazing movie narrated from the perspective of someone who only has short term memory and thus is unreliable even to himself.
Thank you, I did think of Memento based on your description.
Memento is a great movie based on having an unreliable narrator. What's great is that the audience knows he's unreliable the entire time. That's the premise of the film. And yet their able to work in a great overarching story with fantastic twists.
I think the series Mr. Robot does this well too, especially season 2.
Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe.
Also see: Anything else by Gene Wolfe. Mr. Pringles was the master of that particular art. I'm not a New Sun fanboy but it certainly fits. However, I can recommend more Gene Wolfe novels, for example I'm quite fond of The Sorcerer's House, which is told as a series of letters.
I do not get this book.
I loved his other stuff (new sun and latro), but...i don't get wizard knight. I don't feel that the core premise of the story makes any sense, so I feel like i'm missing something, but then I've asked about it and people have just said "no it makes total sense, that's exactly how a person in that situation would react", when the entire time it reminded me of American Gods where the protag just watches OFF THE WALL SHIT and says nothing.
Maybe i'll try it again one day, but man I can barely recall anything about it.
I'm surprised there's a discussion on unreliable narration that doesn't include what to my mind is the premier example of the technique: Nabokov's Lolita. I can understand if the subject matter itself is too much for a lot of people to deal with, but you really can't get a more crystalline example of the technique than Humbert Humbert.
Pretty much everything that Humbert says in the course of the narrative is a self-serving lie, and it doesn't take much analysis to realize this is the case. I think that gets lost on some readers though, because I've seen criticisms that the book glorifies the sexual exploitation of minors, but I think it's pretty obvious that the author views Humbert as a monster; the arresting thing about it is that after a while, you start to realize that on some level Humbert understands this too. When the story starts you're led to believe that Humbert is trying to convince the reader that he's not a monster, when in reality, he's always and only trying to convince himself, and not doing a very good job of it, really. It is, in essence, an unreliable narrator story about how and why we all tell unreliable narratives about ourselves, even if most of us don't reach the depths of monstrosity that Humbert does.
It's truly a masterwork of both style and technique, and I heartily recommend it, if you can muster the fortitude to handle the subject.
It’s a very icky book to recommend, but it is genuinely very good.
To add on to what you’re saying, for anyone who thinks that the book is an endorsement of its subject matter: the explicit framing of the book is Humbert trying to exonerate himself after he was jailed. Humbert is deliberately and openly trying to fish for sympathy from his audience (readers, whom he calls the “jury”). He breaks the fourth wall frequently, and the novel as a whole is essentially a book-length effort at manipulation from a very intelligent individual who masks his malevolence behind more palatable values of love and care.
Humbert knows that he has the microphone and Lolita doesn’t, so he gets to speak entirely on her behalf and construct her character in his image. It’s a significant part of his manipulation, as he makes it sound like Lolita was the one in charge of the situation rather than him. We know from the outside that this isn’t the case, because, of course, she is a child and he is an adult, but Humbert strategically and continually attempts to make us believe otherwise across hundreds of pages.
You said you thought that he doesn’t do a great job at it, but to me, the scary part of the book is that I think he does. It’s actually what I think is particularly brilliant about Nabokov’s writing in the book: he’s good at getting the reader to lose sight of or slightly doubt the fundamental truth of Humbert’s evilness, even if just for a bit. Humbert is charming, persuasive, erudite, thoughtful — even likable. When you’re reading his words and in his head, you can find yourself starting to think: he’s not THAT much of a monster, right?
And then you climb outside of his head and snap back to reality and realize that yes, he very much is. In fact, part of his monstrousness is that he’s able to hide it so well and pull others into its orbit.
I personally think Nabokov wrote the book as a warning that people like Humbert are out there, and that they will work very hard at (and be very good at) getting you to trust them over your own conscience.
I guess I was thinking of the end, where you think for just a second that he understands what a monstrous thing he's done in shattering Dolores's life, and maybe he has just a sliver of a conscience. All the arguments he's made throughout just sort of crumble all at once, and you get an idea of just how full of shit he's been the entire time. It's testament to Nabokov's skill that that moment comes as late as it does, I suppose.
I’m trying to think of video games with an “unreliable narrator,” or at least a similar effect that create cognitive dissonance or lead down a path where you should have been more distrusting of others.
The last example above
Bioshock
I didn't wanna start naming games because they were asking about books but since you opened the flood gates
This is genuinely one of my favorite examples of the power of narrative in video games. I'd love to see more like it.
The Locked Tomb series is my current favorite example of this. It's an unreliable narrator bonanza, where each of the three narrators are unreliable in different ways and for different reasons. In the first book, Gideon the Ninth, the titular perspective character Gideon is a himbo who's constantly left out of the loop. Not that she ever cared to be in the loop; there are hot women afoot! Who cares about a dumb "magical trial" or "murder mystery?" Occupying Gideon's perspective, we see an inversion of the typical mystery formula. In the classic mystery novel, we follow a detective, who accumulates information and solves the case. But Gideon mostly just bumbles around while other smarter and more invested people get shit done. Gideon is regularly stumbling into key evidence and building relationships with crucial characters, while completely failing to understand their significance. This aligns her with the reader, who will almost certainly be as bewildered by the central mystery of the novel, and as astonished by its resolution.
Gideon's sequel, Harrow the Ninth, introduces a new protagonist, Harrow, quite possibly the least reliable narrator of all time. As a result of multiple overlapping cognitive issues (to say the least) Harrow is perpetually unsure of her own sanity, and the facts of the world around her. The reader is trapped in her head by the unusual second-person narration, and forced to experience her unravelling first-hand, through sleepless weeks, hallucinated corpses, and total nervous collapse. About half of Harrow's first two acts is devoted to an entirely unrecognizable retelling of Gideon the Ninth, with a different central mystery, and different characters, and it threatens to unseat the foundation of the entire series. Worse, there's never a sense of dramatic irony, a feeling that even if Harrow doesn't know what's going on, at least you as a reader do. No -- Harrow is a powerful space necromancer, surrounded by several even more powerful space necromancers. It's hardly ever clear whether Harrow is hallucinating, or being gaslit, or glimpsing something she wasn't supposed to. When, at last, the novel's final chapters resolve reality at last -- answering almost every question, eliminating almost every seeming contradiction -- the prevailing feeling is one of relief, the relief a wrung-out sponge must feel after being put away. If Gideon is about a character who knows too little Harrow is about one who knows too much, and who can't possibly trust herself enough to hold it all in her head. It's a wonderful nightmare of a book -- author Tamsyn Muir has said that she relied on her own experience living with schizophrenia to write it, which absolutely tracks.
I won't go into the third book, Nona the Ninth, though its narrator is once again unreliable in new and interesting ways. It's a great series for getting immersed in interesting perspective characters with unique limitations.
Harrow is one of the few books that made its predecessor better. I highly recommend the series as well. I'm curious if the author can stick the landing. There's a lot to handle left.
A Confederacy of dunces
It is a Louisianan don Quixote. Convinced of his genius and on a self quest of sorts.
Amazing book. Terrible and sad backstory. Great recommendation. The first piece of writing from him, I forget it's name -- more novella length -- also a good read.
Dan Simmons' Hyperion does this to some degree between books, and is great sci-fi to boot! It's a neat way to build a trilogy, resetting your understanding of the world each subsequent book.
A Scanner Darkly by Philip Kindred Dick.
As a protagonist in a "book about drugs", the protagonist is completely unreliable.
PKD’s novels are unique in that they usually have the standard depersonalized “omniscient narrator”, but he is unreliable. There are often major plot contradictions and details that don’t add up.
Machado de Assis' "Dom Casmurro"! It's one of the best Brazilian books, one of my favorites. Bentinho (the unreliable narrator) is a master in this art. I only hope that the translation lives up to the source quality — Machado writing is wonderful.
Vonnegut did very well with unreliable narration.
"Slaughterhouse 5" certainly uses it, and I'm fairly certain "Breakfast of Champions" (it's been a while since I've read it) does as well.
Even if it doesn't, I still can't help but recommend both.
Mother Night might be a better example than Breakfast of Champions
a light spoiler for something you learn at the beginning of Blindsight, by Peter Watts
I think Blindsight is an interesting example. Although the narrator does not intentionally lie, he has both a profound brain impairment and a brain specialization (provided by implants or something, I don't remember) that makes his narration and descriptions, at once, highly accurate and highly inconsistent with the human experience. He literally lacks half his brain.
I'm not entirely sure I understand the question? Is this a genre or books I am unaware of? Or a particular narrative quirk? Can you explain what is meant by "unreliable narrator"?
An unreliable narrator typically refers to a narrator that might lie to you (the reader) either intentionally or not. A couple of popular examples are Holden Caulfield from "The Catcher in the Rye," and Humbert Humbert from "Lolita."
In Holden's case, he is considered unreliable because of his youth and inexperience, while Humbert Humbert is desperate to make the reader "understand" his attraction to a child, and emphasizes a sexuality in the girl that is only evident to him. He pretends that he is a victim to her advances, when he is the one in control.
To the OP: Have you read either of those books?
It’s not a big line in The Catcher in the Rye, but it has stuck with me ever since I first read it (bolded emphasis mine):
Holden is all worked up on a rant and clearly shouting, but he’s also completely unaware of it (or lying about it) — even when someone points it out directly to him.
The line stuck with me because I felt like it was such a simple and effective way of driving home Holden’s unreliability. The reactions of other characters are often our insight into what’s really going on because we can’t trust Holden’s own disclosure.
I have not! Somehow I got through high school without ever reading Catcher in the Rye, even though it was required for most other classes. And Lolita sounds… not sure how to describe it. I am definitely intrigued.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is also another common high school read. It’s sort of like the “Unreliable Narrator 101” text.
A nice thing about it is that it’s a very short read, and the narrator is so CLEARLY unreliable. A lot of other unreliable narrators are more softly defined or leave more to subtext, but “Heart” has it right there, plain as day.
Thank you!
Wikipedia explains it better than I could. I have seen it used in movies relatively often. A good example would be the diving scene from Wolf of Wall Street.
Thank you!
I can only think of one book. It's not exactly "unreliable narrator" so much as "the reader and other characters project the wrong intent onto the narrator". One of my favorite unconventional sci-fi books with explorations of cultural anthropology, cultural misunderstandings, and faith (and I am an atheist).
Title hidden unless you're sure you want the spoiler
The Sparrow by Mary Doris Russell
There's also a TV series that was popular a few years ago.
Are you sure you want to know?
Mr Robot
Definitely John Dies at the End. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't know if it holds up. Also, House of Leaves is an interesting exploration of mostly unreliable narration.
I don’t know how well it holds up now, in part because the social landscape has changed since its release and in part because the book had such reach and impact on the genre that the trope is significantly more common now.
But, at the time it came out, the fact that this book had an unreliable narrator was an absolutely phenomenal twist. Stunningly well-executed.
I’ll put the title of it in a spoiler tag, simply because knowing about it in advance really does kind of ruin the whole story.
Spoiler
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
And yes, I do realize this puts people in a bind, because now you’re not sure whether to click on that because you don’t necessarily know what’s in it and whether you already know it. The hint I’ll give without giving too much away: early 2010s thriller.
I'll throw out Stephen King's Insomnia. On top of being one of the few novels almost impossible to adapt to screen, it plays upon these themes.
The protagonist Ralph is an old man in the 90s, in a nasty grief spiral and ever-worsening insomnia. His biases (and delusions) cloud his judgement about the actions of himself and others.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood has an unreliable narrator. Although the reader won't realize that immediately.
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo is my favorite
There is at least one character in The Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson who is an unreliable narrator, but I won't spoil which character. :)
Also,
Spoilers for another book series
I have heard Kvothe from The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss described as an unreliable narrator, and I tend to agree. It's still one of my favorite books despite the author's shenanigans.The ironic part of the series mentioned in the spoiler...
Is that the author is also an unreliable narrator. *drum hit*Seriously, I gave up on ever seeing book three a full decade ago, and the author's subsequent attitude has fully turned me off the series anyway. e.g. the infamous writing stream where he flipped out after accidentally sharing the screen, or his editor saying she'd never seen evidence of any work existing...despite frequently telling readers there was progress. Unlike, say, Scott Lynch, who's always been perfectly transparent about having life getting in the way of writing.
There's a whole section for this on TV Tropes.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is a short book about a protagonist who according to himself is utterly without blame, but who is totally a rotten person. Its short length and the strong dissonance between the protagonist's experience and the reality of the world around him might make this a good introduction to the genre / device.
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe features a protagonist whose view of things just doesn't seem to line up with what's happening around him. I didn't enjoy this unreliable narrator though because there was no tension between what the reader was seeing and what the protagonist was experiencing. It just kind of felt like bad or inconsistent writing at times. People who like it really seem to love it though. And it has really fun world building.
I just finished Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer and the narrator is partly what makes the book. She feeds the perfect amount of information to allow the reader to build assumptions, then circles back to break them. The book is filled with extravagant details and descriptions, but the narrator never comes fully into focus and skews parts of her experience as it happens.
I just finished Agatha Christie's Endless Night this week, and that book does this really well. It's an atmospheric slow burn and deviates a little from her typical detective style mysteries. Without spoiling too much, she does a great job at introducing subtle inconsistencies through the main character's perspective that end up eventually flipping the story on its head.
Another Agatha Christie novel that truly uses the concept is
Spoiler
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.