Top 10 Unreliable Narrators

The Guardian:

Something strange happened to unreliable narrators in the mid-20th century: they became a little more reliably unreliable, and a lot nastier. In the late-19th century they tended to be untrustworthy either because they were hiding something about themselves or had failed to recognise the truth, generally because of some kind of psychological weakness. However, as modernism shifted into post-modernism and we all became that much more cynical, most narrators were expected to be complicated.

Read the whole story: The Guardian

Comments

[klondiker]

11:52 PM on 02/18/2010

Also:

The title character in Nabokov's Pnin.
Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan's Atonement

[larry278]

09:00 PM on 02/18/2010

Does this mean that a writer can combine the traits of Rumsfeld, Cheney & W into 1 unreliable character to write a pot boiler that's short on truthyness & create a best selling, pseudo-classic for the 21st century?

[Steven Burr]

02:59 PM on 02/18/2010

Glaringly obvious omission: the unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground.

I'd also include Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum.

[alisonv]

08:24 AM on 02/18/2010

I would also add Stevens, the butler, who narrates Remains of the Day. In the film, his character justifies his mistakes and those of his boss, but later clearly understands his own self-deception. In the book, the self-deception continues. He doesn't ever seem to fully come to grips with his choices and his errors.

[hilaritee]

12:44 AM on 02/18/2010

i would add Nick Carraway, narrator in the Great Gatsby

[klondiker]

03:04 PM on 02/18/2010

Really?? I didn't see him as unreliable - a little too detached perhaps, but not unreliable. Interesting...

[hilaritee]

01:01 AM on 02/20/2010

he struck me as being seduced by his surroundings and the people in it

[PatrickMurtha]

10:57 PM on 02/17/2010

Somehow he left out the most spectacular example of an unreliable narrator that I have encountered in a lifetime of reading fiction: John Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It always amazes me how few people, even highly educated people, have heard of this book, surely one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

[naschkatze]

11:03 AM on 02/18/2010

I have read the quartet of which The Good Soldier is the first volume. All three of you make important additions to the list, The Remains of the Day, The Great Gatsby, and The Good Soldier. The unreliable narrator may be one of the most emblematic themes of 20th century literature and even an emblem of the century itself. I am glad I read this article and will be looking at the titles on my bookshelves to see how prevalent the unreliable narrator was.