The Unreliable Narrator, From Booth's Own Definition

An unreliable narrator is a narrator whose account the reader learns not to trust, because what they say about events, other people or themselves differs from what the book as a whole shows to be true. The term comes from the critic Wayne C. Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961).

The technique is much older than the name. Booth gave it a label and a test, and that test is still the most useful way to write one. Quotes below are from his book and from William Riggan's study of the type, Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns (1981).

What Is an Unreliable Narrator?

Booth's definition, on pages 158 and 159: "For lack of better terms, I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author's norms), unreliable when he does not."

The key phrase is "the norms of the work". Booth's "implied author" is the sense of the writer the reader builds from the whole book: its values, its judgements, what it treats as true. A reliable narrator agrees with that picture. An unreliable one is at odds with it, and the reader notices the gap.

So unreliability is not the same as being a bad person, or being wrong about one small thing. It is a gap the book itself sets up between the narrator's account and the truth, and lets the reader see.

Does an Unreliable Narrator Have to Be Lying?

No, and this is the most common misreading. Booth's next point, on page 159: "It is most often a matter of what James calls inconscience; the narrator is mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him."

Most unreliable narrators believe what they say. They are proud, frightened, young, grieving or self-deceived, and they tell the truth as they see it. The reader sees further.

Huckleberry Finn is the classic case. In chapter 31 of Mark Twain's novel, Huck writes a letter telling Jim's owner where to find him, then tears it up. He has been taught that helping an escaped slave is a sin, and he believes it: "All right, then, I'll go to hell". The book's norms say the opposite. Huck is doing the most decent thing in the story while telling us he is damned. He is unreliable, and he isn't lying.

What Are the Types of Unreliable Narrator?

The best-known typology is William Riggan's, from Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (University of Oklahoma Press, 1981). He groups unreliable first-person narrators into four types, "the picaro, the clown, the madman, and the naif".

A common misattribution: many websites give Riggan five types and add "the liar". His title and his book name four. The liar is a useful idea, and plenty of narrators do deceive, but it isn't one of Riggan's categories.

Other critics divide the field differently. James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin sort unreliability by what goes wrong rather than by who the narrator is. A narrator can get the facts wrong, misunderstand them, or judge them wrongly, and can also tell too little on each count. Their six kinds are misreporting, misreading, misregarding, underreporting, underreading and underregarding. Their test case is Stevens in The Remains of the Day.

A simple working split for writers is the one Booth's own sentence suggests: a narrator who is mistaken (they believe it) and a narrator who is deceiving (they know better).

Is It Only in First Person?

Mostly, but not only. Riggan's book is about first-person narrators, and that is where the technique is strongest, because the reader has no other voice to check the narrator against. Booth's scheme also sets first-person narrators beside third-person "reflectors", the characters a third-person narrative stays close to, and either can be at odds with the book. If you are still choosing a viewpoint, first person vs third person sets out what each one allows.

Examples of Unreliable Narrators

Spoilers are kept to the set-up, except where flagged.

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain, 1884). A naif. He opens by telling us Mark Twain "told the truth, mainly", which tells the reader something about how he reads the world, and how to read him.
• The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford, 1915). John Dowell's first line is "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." He lived it, but he talks as if he had only heard it, and much of the novel is him finding out what was going on in front of him.
• The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989). Stevens, an English butler, looks back on his years of service. The critic Kathleen Wall argued that Stevens stretches the older theories: his unreliability is not only in his judgements but in how the telling itself is shaped, so that at points the reader cannot be sure what happened at all.
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie, 1926). Spoiler warning: it is famous as an unreliable-narrator novel, and knowing that much already changes how you read it. If you haven't read it, read it before anything else about it.

The useful lesson for writers is that a narrator can be reliable about some things and not others. Many get the facts right and the meaning wrong. That is often the most powerful kind, because the reader is given the evidence and has to see past the person reading it to them.

How Do You Write an Unreliable Narrator?

The reader has to catch the gap. If they never do, you haven't written an unreliable narrator, you've written a narrator who happened to be wrong.

1. Decide the truth first. Write down what really happened, and why the narrator tells it differently: pride, guilt, love, fear, youth.
2. Choose mistaken or deceiving. A mistaken narrator gives himself away without meaning to. A deceiving one has to slip.
3. Put a clue in every scene. Each scene carries the narrator's claim and one thing that doesn't fit it. This is where unreliability lives.
4. Let the clues come from outside the narrator. Other characters' reactions, objects, dates, a letter. These are the book's norms showing through. A detail planted like this has to pay off later, in the spirit of Chekhov's gun.
5. Let the narrator report what they don't understand. Accurate facts, wrong meaning. In Phelan and Martin's terms, a misreader rather than a misreporter. The reader does the reading.
6. Decide whether to reveal. Some books end with the truth in plain sight. Others never confirm it, and leave the reader sure without being told.

A Worked Example

Ruth narrates. She tells us she has always been the one who tried, and that the falling-out with her brother Owen was his doing.

1. The phone call. Ruth says: "I rang Owen every Sunday." The clue: his wife answers and sounds surprised to hear her voice.
2. The birthday. Ruth says she never once forgot his birthday. The clue: the card she posts is addressed to a flat he left four years ago.
3. The wedding photo. Ruth says he left her out of the wedding. The clue: she is in the photo, standing apart, arms folded.
4. The letter. The reveal: in her own drawer, Owen's letter asking her to come, unopened for six years.

Ruth isn't lying. She believes every word. Each scene lets the reader see a little more than she does, so by the last one the letter confirms what the reader already suspects.

How Do You Plan an Unreliable Narrator in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis. It is a good place to track two stories at once: what the narrator says, and what is true.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene.
2. In each synopsis, write the narrator's claim and the clue that undercuts it, for example "Ruth says: I rang every Sunday. Clue: his wife sounds surprised."
3. Open a scene and make two labels, "Clue" and "Reveal" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses). Give "Reveal" a colour of its own.
4. Set "Clue" on every scene that carries one, and "Reveal" on the scene where the truth comes out.
5. Switch the Outliner to its list. Read down the colours: a run of clues, then the reveal. A long stretch with no clue is where the reader stops seeing the gap.
6. If you want the truth beside each claim, add a column in the list with the + at the end of the header row (Add custom column) and call it "What is true".

For the narrator themselves, a Codex entry for the character is the place to write down who they really are, which the book never states outright. To move a clue earlier or later, drag its card on the Outliner. And once a draft is done, reading it for plot holes is a good check that every clue you planted still points at the truth.

Common Mistakes

• No clues. If the reader can't see the gap until a final twist, the twist feels like a cheat. The truth should be findable on a second read.
• Clues only in the narrator's voice. Winks to the reader in the narration break the effect. Let the world contradict the narrator.
• Confusing unreliable with unlikeable. A cruel narrator who reports accurately is reliable. Unreliability is about the account, not the person.
• Assuming it means lying. Booth's point is that most unreliable narrators are mistaken, and believe what they say.
• Crediting Riggan with "the liar". His four types are the picaro, the clown, the madman and the naif.

Sources

Retrieved 25 October 2026.

• Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 158 and 159 (archive.org). The wording was checked through Open Library's search inside, against many scholarly works that quote these pages; the book's own scan is not searchable there.
• William Riggan, Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (University of Oklahoma Press, 1981) (archive.org).
• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapters 1 and 31 (Project Gutenberg).
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Part 1 (Project Gutenberg).
• James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin, "The Lessons of 'Weymouth': Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day", in David Herman (ed.), Narratologies (Ohio State University Press, 1999).
• Kathleen Wall, "The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration", Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (1994), pp. 18 to 42.