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# Unreliable Narrator: Definition, Types and Examples
- URL: https://leventbulut.com/unreliable-narrator-definition-examples/
- Published: 2026-10-16T17:08:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-16T17:08:15.000Z
- Description: What is an unreliable narrator and how do you spot one? Booth's definition, six types of unreliability, and examples from Poe, Christie and Ishiguro.
- Author: Levent Bulut
- Tags: Case Studies, Narrative Engineering

# What Is an Unreliable Narrator? Definition, Types and Examples

**Conflict of Interest and Academic Grounding Statement (COI):** This article defines the unreliable narrator on the basis of core sources in narrative theory and discusses its relation to the Objective Projection method. [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/About/) is the founder of the Objective Projection and Narrative Engineering methodology. The methodology's rules and dataset are openly published and open to scrutiny. The example passage in this article was written for it. The connections proposed here are a proposed reading; they have not been tested with readers. 

### Summary and Conceptual Framework

An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose account the reader cannot fully trust. Wayne C. Booth introduced the term in 1961\. Unreliability does not always mean lying: a narrator may misreport events, misread them, misjudge them, or leave things out. This article defines the concept, summarizes James Phelan's six types of unreliability and William Riggan's four narrator types, introduces classic examples from Poe to Agatha Christie and Kazuo Ishiguro, and discusses how readers detect unreliability. In the final section we offer a proposal: an unreliable narrator is often detected when the name a narrator gives their own feeling contradicts the physical details the text shows.

## What is an unreliable narrator?

The American literary theorist Wayne C. Booth first used the term in his 1961 book *The Rhetoric of Fiction*. For Booth, a narrator is reliable when they speak and act in accordance with the norms of the work, and unreliable when they do not. The “norms” here are the values and outlook that emerge from the text as a whole, which Booth attributed to what he called the “implied author.”

Put more simply: with an unreliable narrator, the reader senses a gap between what the narrator says and what they understand from elsewhere in the text. That gap invites the reader to look not at the narrator's words but between the lines. The unreliable narrator is most often a first-person narrator, since limited knowledge and personal interests leave room to be mistaken or to mislead.

## At a glance: six types of unreliability

The American narratologist James Phelan distinguishes six types according to what the narrator is unreliable about. Three concern saying something wrong; three concern saying too little.

| Type           | What does the narrator do?                                     |
| -------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Misreporting   | Gets the facts of events wrong.                                |
| Misreading     | Draws wrong conclusions about events or characters.            |
| Misregarding   | Makes wrong value or ethical judgments.                        |
| Underreporting | Leaves facts out or presents them insufficiently.              |
| Underreading   | Interprets events or characters insufficiently.                |
| Underregarding | Fails to make, or insufficiently makes, the needed evaluation. |

## Four types of unreliable narrator

In his 1981 book, William Riggan groups unreliable first-person narrators into four types: the pícaro (a boastful, adventuring narrator), the madman (a narrator who insists on their sanity while the text contradicts it), the naïf (a narrator too inexperienced or innocent to grasp what is happening) and the clown (a narrator who plays games with the reader). Among the examples given in the sources, the narrators of Poe's stories are placed with the madman type, Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's *The Catcher in the Rye* with the naïf, and Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's *Lolita* with the clown.

## Classic examples

### Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)

The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's story insists to the reader that he is not mad, and to make the reader believe it he recounts the murder he committed in detail. The reader disbelieves him precisely because of that insistence and those details. We discussed this story, and how an unreliable narrator can make telling legitimate, in [showing versus telling in horror](https://leventbulut.com/showing-versus-telling-in-horror-wayne-booth/).

### Agatha Christie, *The Murder of Roger Ackroyd* (1926)

**Spoiler warning:** This section reveals the novel's ending.

Christie's novel is narrated by James Sheppard, the village doctor who assists Hercule Poirot. At the end, Poirot reveals that the killer is the narrator himself. Sheppard never openly lies to the reader; he only skips the decisive moments or passes over them in ambiguous sentences. In Phelan's terms this is an example of “underreporting.” The novel has been debated ever since it appeared: some critics felt Christie cheated the reader, while others argued it plays by the rules. We discussed the “fair play” principle of detective fiction, which holds that the reader should be able to identify the culprit from the clues, in [Fair-Play Clues in Detective Fiction](https://leventbulut.com/fair-play-clues-detective-fiction/).

### Kazuo Ishiguro, *The Remains of the Day* (1989)

Ishiguro's novel is narrated by Stevens, a butler who served for years at an English country house. Stevens neither lies nor knowingly hides anything; but he constantly misjudges his own life, his employer and his feelings for the woman he loves. The reader understands what Stevens has lost from what he does not say. We discussed the AI narrator of another Ishiguro novel, Klara, who tries to read people's emotions from their faces, in [Klara and the Sun](https://leventbulut.com/klara-and-the-sun-ai-narrator-reading-emotions/).

## Unreliable narrators who don't lie

The unreliable narrator should not be confused with a lying narrator. Of Phelan's six types, only one, misreporting, is about getting facts wrong; the others concern interpretation, evaluation or omission. A narrator may deceive themselves, see the world through a different perception, or narrate in their own defense.

Jane Austen's characters often misread themselves; Austen's free indirect discourse lets the reader notice that misreading. We discussed this in the [Jane Austen](https://leventbulut.com/jane-austen-show-dont-tell-free-indirect-discourse/) article. Mary Shelley's creature, on the other hand, tells his own story in order to persuade the one in front of him; we discussed his narrative in the [Frankenstein](https://leventbulut.com/frankenstein-creature-voice-show-dont-tell/) article.

## How do readers detect unreliability?

The German narratologist Ansgar Nünning criticized Booth's approach for not taking the reader's role sufficiently into account and proposed a reader-centered, cognitive approach. On his view, unreliability depends largely on the reader's mental frames, and the reader infers it from three kinds of signals:

1. **Signals inside the text:** the narrator contradicting themselves, other characters describing them differently, events not matching the narrator's interpretation.
2. **Knowledge outside the text:** what the reader knows about the world; for instance, general knowledge of how a person would behave in such circumstances.
3. **The reader's literary competence:** what the reader knows about the conventions of the genre and the tradition of the unreliable narrator.

We discussed what mental model readers build from physical cues and general world knowledge in [Situation Models](https://leventbulut.com/cognitive-poetics-situation-models-reader/).

## When the stated feeling and the shown detail conflict

This article proposes that one of the moments an unreliable narrator is most often detected is a contradiction between the name the narrator gives their own feeling and the physical details the text shows. The short passage below was written for this article:

> I wasn't angry at all. I stirred my tea; the spoon struck the rim of the glass three times. I folded the letter and put it in my pocket, then took it out and read it again. As I shut the door, the glass in the frame shook.

In the first sentence the narrator names a feeling, or rather denies the feeling they name. But each of the next three sentences shows a detail that contradicts that denial: the spoon striking the glass, the letter read again and again, the shaking pane. The reader most likely believes the details, not the first sentence.

The **Emotion Embargo**, one of Objective Projection's two constitutional prohibitions, proposes that emotion not be named in the text but built from observable details such as light, sound, movement and space. The unreliable narrator offers an interesting exception to this rule: here the emotion word is used deliberately, but it is given to the reader not as information but as a claim to be tested. The details become the means of testing that claim. This is consistent with proposals we have discussed on this site about the limits of the Emotion Embargo: when the real subject of a text is the distance between narrator and reader, an emotion word is not a label but the material of that distance. That readers trust the detail more than the label remains a hypothesis in this article; it has not been tested with readers.

## What the doctrine cannot say here

- It cannot say that readers detect unreliable narrators thanks to physical details. This is a proposed reading; it has not been tested with reader data.
- It cannot decide whether the unreliable narrator is a good or bad narrative choice. The doctrine proposes a writing technique; it does not pass judgments of literary value.
- It cannot claim that Poe, Christie or Ishiguro worked with a method resembling Objective Projection. The resemblance is a retrospective interpretation.
- It does not replace the classifications of Booth, Phelan, Riggan and Nünning; this article only summarizes them.

## Limitations

This article rests on summaries of core sources on the theory of the unreliable narrator; the theorists' works were not examined directly, and it does not cover the whole debate. The Turkish names of Phelan's types used in the Turkish version of this article were proposed for it and may not have established equivalents. The works are not quoted; events are summarized. The example passage was written for this article. The doctrine's concepts and sources are listed in [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/graph/)'s knowledge graph, and published works on the [Levent Bulut](https://leventbulut.com/corpus/) corpus page.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### What is an unreliable narrator?

An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose account the reader cannot fully trust. Wayne C. Booth introduced the term in 1961: for Booth, a narrator is unreliable when they do not speak or act in accordance with the norms of the work.

### Does an unreliable narrator lie?

Not always. A narrator may misreport facts, but may also misread events, misjudge them, or leave things out. A narrator who deceives themselves or sees the world differently is also unreliable.

### What are examples of unreliable narrators?

Classic examples include the narrator of Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Dr. Sheppard in Agatha Christie's *The Murder of Roger Ackroyd*, the butler Stevens in Ishiguro's *The Remains of the Day*, Salinger's Holden Caulfield and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert.

### How can you tell if a narrator is unreliable?

Readers usually detect unreliability when the narrator contradicts themselves, when other characters describe them differently, when events do not match the narrator's interpretation, or when the name the narrator gives their feeling contradicts the details shown.

### Which point of view do unreliable narrators use?

The unreliable narrator is most often a first-person narrator, since limited knowledge and personal interests leave room to be mistaken or to mislead.

## References

- Booth, W. C. (1961). *The Rhetoric of Fiction*. University of Chicago Press.
- Christie, A. (1926). *The Murder of Roger Ackroyd*. William Collins, Sons.
- Ishiguro, K. (1989). *The Remains of the Day*. Faber & Faber.
- Phelan, J. (2005). *Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration*. Cornell University Press.
- Poe, E. A. (1843). The Tell-Tale Heart. *The Pioneer*.
- Riggan, W. (1981). *Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator*. University of Oklahoma Press.
- The Living Handbook of Narratology. Unreliability. [lhn.uni-hamburg.de](https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/66.html?ref=leventbulut.com) (accessed 15 October 2026).
- Wikipedia. Unreliable narrator; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. [en.wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable%5Fnarrator?ref=leventbulut.com) (accessed 15 October 2026).

## Cite this article

```
@misc{bulut2026unreliableen,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {What Is an Unreliable Narrator? Definition, Types and Examples},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/unreliable-narrator-definition-examples/}},
  note         = {leventbulut.com}
}
```