Perhaps the king of the contemporary unreliable narrator is Bret Easton Ellis. Likewise, the author may use ambiguity or opacity in rendering a character, so as to force the reader to make their own decisions about a narrator's reliability, as in Kafka's refusal to name the crime that Josef K. Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac narrator of Nabokov's Lolita, portrays himself in such as way as to solicit sympathy and even empathy from the reader. That is, they may be withholding or skewing information in order to manipulate their audience: the reader.Īrguably, there is a type of moral unreliability, as well. (For a more comprehensive list of these books, visit BookBrowse's specially themed category.)*Ī narrator may also be unreliable in a conscious way. Books such as Room and In the Country of Men are two shining examples of books written for adults but written from a child's perspective. In the case of the latter, the narrator's illness inclines along with the narrative: as the novel and Rachel's mental illness progress, everything is called into question.Īnother reason is that the narrator might be a child - too innocent or naïve to provide a reliable perspective for readers.

The most obvious one is insanity, as in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or Stephan Benatar's Wish Her Safe At Home. There are many reasons why a narrator might be deemed unreliable. The term, as a formal literary device, comes from critic Wayne C.

The idea of the unreliable narrator has long been an issue in fiction, dating back to medieval times. He acknowledges that it's probably impossible to tell, objectively, the story of your own life, and that it's therefore up to the reader to question or validate his authority.

In Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, Tony Webster admits that he may not be a reliable narrator. This article relates to The Sense of an Ending

Tony webster the sense of an ending