The Unreliable Narrator

The first thing to say is that an unreliable narrator is used in a First Person Point of View novel.

So if you have your heart set on a Third Person Point of View narrative, unreliable narrators won't be for you!

What Is an Unreliable Narrator?

As readers of fiction, we expect a character telling a story in the first person to be straight and honest with us. They can lie all they want to other characters, but not to the audience listening to them tell their tale. When a first person character breaks this trust, they are no longer reliable storytellers.

What do I mean by a narrator being "honest"? Well, the obvious thing is that they can't lie to us. But over and above that, they cannot deliberately withhold information that has a bearing on the story being told.

In short, they mustn't just tell the truth, they must tell the whole truth, too. If they don't, they will be unreliable and you will be writing a totally different novel.

• So if they are a suspect in a murder investigation, for example, and they are guilty, they have to tell us. They can't deliberately withhold it until the novel's climax, then say: "Ha, ha! Had you fooled, suckers!"



• Or if they are the detective in the murder investigation and they suddenly deduce that the butler did it, they have to share this information with us.

It is simply one of those unwritten agreements between writers and readers of first person novels; break the agreement and your readers will feel cheated.

Now, there are two things you must be clear about here:

First, although a standard first person narrator is expected to share with us all of the relevant information in their possession, it only applies to information that they are in possession of at this particular point in the story.

When a first person narrator sits down to write a story, the story itself is over, in the past. So when they write Chapter 1, for example, they already know how the novel will end. The viewpoint character doesn't, though - for them, the story's end is still in the future.

And so, in Chapter 1, the narrator cannot withhold information that the viewpoint character is in possession of at this point in the story. But they can withhold information that the viewpoint character won't discover until the next chapter.