unreliable narrator

Syllables: un·re·li·a·ble nar·rat·or/(ˌ)ʌnɹɪˌlaɪəbl nəˈɹeɪtə/US/ˌʌnɹəˌlaɪəb(ə)l ˈnɛˌɹeɪtɚ/

unreliable narrator noun: a narrating character or storyteller in a story (such as a film, novel, play, or song) who provides conflicting, inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise questionable information to the audience or reader.

Noun

unreliable narrator (plural unreliable narrators)

A narrating character or storyteller in a story (such as a film, novel, play, or song) who provides conflicting, inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise questionable information to the audience or reader.
- [page 158] For practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator. […] [page 159] Unreliable narrators thus differ markedly depending on how far...1961, Wayne C[layson] Booth, “Types of Narration”, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, published 1968, →OCLC, part I (Artistic Purity and the Rhetoric of...
- The Priest also places a moral barrier between himself and his tale by establishing himself as an "unreliable narrator" capable of deception and irony. Thus, through his habit of speaking equivocally, he can disavow responsibility for his frequently provocative words.1969 September, Charles A. Watkins, “Chaucer’s Sweete Preest”, in Earl R. Wasserman et al., editors, ELH [English Literary History], volume 36, number 3, Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Press...

unreliable narrator meaning in Indonesian and Thai

unreliable narrator in Indonesian

narrating character or storyteller who provides questionable information to the audience or reader: pengisah lancung

unreliable narrator in Thai

narrating character or storyteller who provides questionable information to the audience or reader: ผู้บรรยายเรื่องผู้ไม่น่าเชื่อถือ

Examples of unreliable narrator in a sentence

The unreliable narrator demonstrates how the spirit of the times colours the work of storytellers, and how they in turn help to shape that spirit.1999, Robert Fulford, “The Cracked Mirror of Modernity”, in The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture (CBC Massey...
[…] Patrick, for all his brutal truth telling, is an unreliable narrator.2000 April 17, Richard Corliss, “A Yuppie’s Killer Instinct [review of American Psycho]”, in Time, New York, N.Y.: Time Warner Publishing...
Simply put, an unreliable narrator is one whose version of events runs counter to the story's true actions and to readers' interpretation of those events.2011, Judy Doenges, “The Truthless Narrator”, in Andrea Barrett, Peter Turchi, editors, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft...
Omnipedia is an unreliable narrator – we are encouraged to look at the edit logs of each wiki page, to see what information is new and what has been deleted.2021 September 16, Sarah Maria Griffin, “Neurocracy: Futuristic Murder-mystery Fiction as Told through Wikipedia”, in Katharine Viner...

Forms of unreliable narrator

plural	unreliable narrators

Origin of unreliable narrator

Apparently coined by the U.S. literary critic Wayne Clayson Booth (1921–2005) in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): see the quotation.

Questions about unreliable narrator

What does unreliable narrator mean?: Unreliable narrator means a narrating character or storyteller in a story (such as a film, novel, play, or song) who provides conflicting, inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise questionable information to the audience or reader.
What is unreliable narrator in Indonesian?: Unreliable narrator in Indonesian is pengisah lancung. See Unreliable narrator meaning in Indonesian.
How do you use unreliable narrator in a sentence?: The unreliable narrator demonstrates how the spirit of the times colours the work of storytellers, and how they in turn help to shape that spirit.
What part of speech is unreliable narrator?: Unreliable narrator is a noun.
How do you pronounce unreliable narrator?: Unreliable narrator is pronounced /(ˌ)ʌnɹɪˌlaɪəbl nəˈɹeɪtə/ (UK).
What is the plural of unreliable narrator?: The plural of unreliable narrator is unreliable narrators.

Words near unreliable narrator in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: unreliable narrator (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-unreliable narrator.wav.

Cite this entry: “unreliable narrator.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unreliable_narrator. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.