Memoirs, autobiographies and autobiographical fiction have the author as narrator and character. Unreliable narrators aren't limited to fiction.
Other notable examples of unreliable narrators include Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.
To some extent ALL narrators are unreliable, varying in degree from trust-worthy Ishmael in Moby Dick to the severely retarded Benjy in The Sound and the Fury and the criminal Humbert Humbert in Lolita. This process creates a tension that is a central force behind the power of first person narratives, and provide the only unbiased clues about the character of the narrator. The author in these cases must give reader information the narrator does not intend she may deduce the truth. This can be due to that character's biases, ulterior motives, psychological instability, youth, or a limited or second-hand knowledge of the events. Īn unreliable narrator is a character who may be giving an imperfect or incorrect account, either consciously or unconsciously. Many have suggested that all first-person narration, and indeed narration generally, is inescapably unreliable. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel in contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst. Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience makes them inherently unreliable. In the Merchant's Tale, for instance, the narrator, being unhappy in his marriage, applies a misogynistic slant to much of his tale. One of the earliest known examples of unreliable narration is Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. In literature and film, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction ) is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability, or a powerful bias, or else simply by a lack of knowledge. But novels, with their immersive fictional worlds, created a problem, especially when the narrator's views differed significantly from that of the author.
Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author. Until the late 1800s, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like The Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). The concept of the unreliable narrator (as opposed to Author) became more important with the rise of the novel in the 19th Century. The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983) - Wayne Boothīoth Hitchcock and Nabokov made substantial use of the narrative devices of the doppelgänger and the "unreliable narrator," established in the 19th century romantic literature that heavily influenced both men.
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