unreliable narrator

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a narrative device in which the story is told by a narrator whose credibility is compromised by limited knowledge, psychological disturbance, self-interest, moral blindness, or deliberate deception, requiring the reader to read critically between the lines of the narrated account to reconstruct a more accurate picture of events; the term was coined by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961 and has become one of the most productive concepts in narrative theory; unreliable narrators range from the pathologically self-deceived — as in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day — to the knowingly manipulative — as in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita — to the cognitively limited — as in the child narrators of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; the device invites readers into active co-construction of meaning and raises epistemological questions about the nature of testimony, memory, and narrative authority