Cher Thompson is a Senior Staff Writer at Screen Rant, where she covers everything from explosive reality TV moments to cast interviews about the twists and turns of scripted dramas. With a background in creative writing, marketing, and teaching, Cher knows how to spot both the storytelling genius and the guilty pleasures in pop culture. Her work blends wit with insight, making readers feel like they’re chatting with a friend who just happens to know way too much about TV.
Unreliable narrators are one of the most intriguing parts of literature, and the best of them bring a transformative quality to a story that leaves readers questioning everything they think they know about what they’re reading. While some unreliable narrators aren’t untrustworthy on purpose, others are toying with their readers in a way that feels fundamentally manipulative, allowing the author to dive in and out of the reality of a narrative. Despite their authenticity being in question, unreliable narrators are some of the most fun in terms of perspective, with their behavior allowing the authors behind the work more flexibility.
Literary history is filled with narrators whose accounts of the stories they’re telling are notoriously difficult to trust. While there are readers who don’t always pick up on the cues of an unreliable narrator early, by the time they’ve reached the end of the novel, there’s typically an understanding that whatever’s just occurred may not be the truth. Some of the most memorable examples of the unreliable narrator are particularly effective because readers don’t connect the dots immediately, but instead have to work through the bulk of the novel before they know they can’t necessarily trust what they’ve been reading.
10
Amy Dunne/Nick Dunne
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/gone-girl-book-cover-with-sticker-proclaiming-it-thriller-of-the-year.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=749&dpr=2" />
</figure>
While one of the most modern examples of unreliable narration, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn brings Amy Dunne and her husband, Nick Dunne, into the spotlight as a tandem of distrust. When Amy disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary, Nick is left under investigation as a suspect for her potential murder. The novel alternates between points of view, with both Nick’s accounts of events and Amy’s diary entries proving that neither of them has a clear recollection of what’s happened in their lives. With both manipulating everyone around them when they’re apart and each other, their status as narrators is particularly untrustworthy.
Gone Girl is available for purchase through this link.
9
Pi Patel
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/71n-s6e7dwl.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=2" />
</figure>
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi follows Piscine “Pi” Patel, an Indian teenager who becomes stranded in the Pacific Ocean after a brutal shipwreck. His fantastical account of surviving over 200 days in a lifeboat alongside a Bengal tiger, aptly named Richard Parker, comes into question after he reaches safety. When he offers Japanese investigators a second account that’s both far more disturbing than the first and comes without animals, it becomes unclear what actually happened and leaves Pi unreliable. While the parallels between the stories exist, the fact that Pi’s narratives diverge makes him a consistently untrustworthy source of information.
Life of Pi is available for purchase through this link.
8
Yunior de Las Casas
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/61gxsfydeal.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1" />
</figure>
A Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao introduces Oscar de Leon as its central character, but does so through the voice of his friend, Yunior de Las Casas. Yunior may be sharing the story for Oscar, an overweight Dominican American aspiring writer who’s searching for love and struggling with his family’s expectations, but it’s clear from the beginning that he’s not telling the full truth. Yunior even admits to the fact that he’s reconstructing events and inventing details throughout the novel. His personal involvement with Oscar makes for a muddied narration throughout.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is available for purchase through this link.
7
Narrator
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
As Chuck Palahniuk’s most famous work, Fight Club follows an unnamed office worker whose insomnia and intense dissatisfaction with consumerism leads him to support groups. Those groups eventually establish him as a part of the titular fight club alongside charismatic Tyler Durden, but as the narrator’s account continues, it becomes clear that we shouldn’t be trusting what he’s saying. The narrator’s behavior becomes more difficult to trust as his memories and perception of events begin to blur, creating one of the most dissonant novels in the modern era. Palahniuk’s narrator’s unreliable perspective makes the reader experience their fractured understanding of the world in a first-hand way.
Fight Club is available for purchase through this link.
6
Briony Tallis
Atonement by Ian McEwan
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/6867.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1" />
</figure>
Ian McEwan’s Atonement sees 13-year-old Briony Tallis take the mantle of the unreliable narrator in one of the most devastating modern novels there is. When Briony misinterprets an encounter between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, along with another disturbing incident, she accuses Robbie of a crime he didn’t commit. With devastating consequences for everyone involved, the novel draws the story out until its final stretch, which makes it clear that Briony has reshaped the story as a writer throughout the previous pages without the reader knowing. Unsettling in nature, Briony is the type of unreliable narrator that makes readers question themselves long after the story ends.
Atonement is available for purchase through this link.
5Enjoying this article? Support our work with a small crypto donation.
Narrator
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/81k-xno1aol.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1" />
</figure>
A short story, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart may be one of his most commercially successful works, but the narrator of the story is one of the most consistently unreliable in literature. The story follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity while describing a brutal murder, carefully recounting the crime and how he’s concealed the body of an elderly man beneath the floorboards. Convinced that he’s rational because of his careful planning and his motivations, the increasingly frantic behavior of the narrator undermines nearly every single claim he makes throughout the story, building a sense of contradiction throughout The Tell-Tale Heart.
The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories is available for purchase through this link.
4
Humbert Humbert
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/lolita.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=2" />
</figure>
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is narrated by literature professor Humbert Humbert, who recounts the abuse and exploitation of Dolores Haze, a 12-year-old girl he calls Lolita. While Humbert tries to frame his actions through a lens of frenzied romantic passion, using emotional appeals to the reader and a ton of elaborate language, his eloquence doesn’t cancel out the reality of what he’s sharing. He often minimizes Dolores’ suffering while focusing on his own desires and justifications for his actions, which makes him both deeply disturbing and entirely unreliable in delivering the story. Lolita’s readers are quick to understand his manipulation without accepting his self-serving storytelling.
Lolita is available for purchase through this link.
3
Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/a1ylgmse1ml.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=2" />
</figure>
Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which was the author’s final novel, was one of her most psychologically torturous. Following Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, who lives in isolation with her sister Constance after most of their family dies from arsenic poisoning, Merricat’s narration initially points to the villagers as the prime suspects for her family’s deaths. As the novel unfolds, Merricat’s unwavering loyalty to her sister comes into question, and the story unravels to reveal that the poisoning was likely her own doing. Merricat’s unreliability lies in her omissions as much as her distortion of the truth.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle is available for purchase through this link.
2
John Dowell
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/61zdim41sxl.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1" />
</figure>
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier recounts the shared lives of a pair of couples whose relationships seem fairly standard upfront, but beneath the surface, are filled with emotional turmoil, adultery, and tragedy. Narrated by John Dowell from a future point of view, the story attempts to make sense of his marriage to Florence while also laying out their friendship with Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. With the account moving through time and gradually revealing information that changes and reframes the story, John’s narration isn’t always reliable. His limited understanding of the people he spent the most time around makes him questionable, at best.
The Good Soldier is available for purchase through this link.
1
Nick Carraway
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
<<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/great-gatsby-book-cover-a-crying-face-in-the-sky.jpeg?q=49&fit=crop&w=749&dpr=2" />
</figure>
As one of the most unreliable narrators of all time, The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway tells the story he perceives, not the one that necessarily happens. Through Nick, a mid-western import who moves to Long Island and becomes an acquaintance of the wealthy Jay Gatsby, readers are able to see the way that Gatsby pursues Daisy Buchanan and the consequences of his obsession. While Nick presents himself as a fair outsider, the account he shares is colored by his own personal feelings, especially when it comes to his rose-colored glasses about Gatsby. Nick’s unreliable account is one of the most well-known examples of unreliable narration of all time.
The Great Gatsby is available for purchase through this link.
Discover more from NAIRAVOICE.COM.NG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
