Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/9-narrators-you-cant-trust-and-thats-the-point/
There’s a particular kind of unease that comes from reading a story and slowly realizing the person guiding you through it may be lying. Not to the other characters. To you. These narrators lack credibility in their recounting of plot events, which can either be immediately obvious or revealed gradually as contradictions emerge. The effect is disorienting in the best possible way.
The term “unreliable narrator” was coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction. Since then, writers have used the device not just as a trick, but as a genuine way of exploring how subjective and fragile our sense of truth really is. The nine narrators below do exactly that – each one magnificent in their own specific flavor of deception.
1. Humbert Humbert – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
Vladimir Nabokov’s complex tale is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert, who is unhinged and sometimes willfully unreliable. Humbert’s obsession with his stepdaughter and his treatment of her mother are only justified in his mind, but it is through his perspective that the reader learns the story. His prose is gorgeous, almost seductive in its elegance, which is part of what makes it so troubling.
This provides a powerful metaphor: we never hear the victim’s voice without the filter of her abuser. It might even be said we never see or hear from Dolores herself, but only…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-04-14 11:53:00
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