I have a confession. I do not trust narrators. Not in fiction, and frankly not in real life either. When someone tells me a story, I am always listening for the gaps, the omissions, the places where the storyteller is shaping the narrative to serve their own interests. This is probably a professional hazard of working in publishing, where every manuscript I read is, at some level, an act of persuasion. But it also makes me a particularly enthusiastic reader of fiction that uses unreliable narrators, because those books take the thing I am already doing, questioning the storyteller, and make it part of the experience.

The unreliable narrator is one of the oldest techniques in fiction, and it has never gone out of style. From Cervantes to Charlotte Bronte to Nabokov to Gillian Flynn, writers have been giving us narrators whose version of events cannot be fully trusted. The technique keeps coming back because it taps into something fundamental about how we process stories, and I think it is worth exploring why.

Let me start by being specific about what I mean by “unreliable narrator,” because the term covers a lot of ground. At its broadest, an unreliable narrator is any first-person narrator whose account of events is inaccurate, incomplete, or deliberately deceptive. But within that broad definition, there are meaningfully different types of unreliability, and they create different reading experiences.

The first type is what I think of as the naive narrator. This is a narrator who is unreliable not because they are lying but because they lack the understanding, experience, or intelligence to accurately interpret what they are witnessing. Huckleberry Finn is the classic example. Huck describes events and behaviors without fully understanding their moral significance. He sees slavery and racism as normal features of his world, and the gap between what Huck reports and what the reader understands creates irony that is both funny and devastating. The reader has to do active work, filling in the meaning that the narrator cannot see.

This type of unreliable narrator is particularly effective in stories about childhood or adolescence, where the narrator’s limited perspective mirrors the actual cognitive limitations of young people. Emma Donoghue’s Room uses a five-year-old narrator to describe a situation of horrific captivity, and the child’s innocent interpretation of his imprisonment is far more disturbing than a straightforward adult account would be. The unreliability here is not a trick. It is a lens that intensifies the reader’s emotional response by forcing them to see the truth that the narrator cannot.

The second type is the self-deceiving narrator. This narrator is not deliberately lying to the reader; they are lying to themselves. They have constructed a version of their own story that protects their ego, justifies their actions, or avoids a painful truth. The reader’s job is to see through the self-deception and reconstruct what actually happened.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is perhaps the finest example of this type. Stevens, the butler, narrates his story in prose that is meticulous, measured, and deeply repressed. He describes decades of service with a careful formality that the attentive reader gradually recognizes as a defense mechanism. Stevens cannot admit, even to himself, that he was in love with the housekeeper Miss Kenton, or that his unwavering loyalty to his employer was misplaced. The entire novel is an exercise in reading between the lines of a narrator who cannot read between the lines of his own life.

What makes self-deceiving narrators so powerful is that they mirror something true about human psychology. We all construct self-serving narratives about our own lives. We all have blind spots, rationalizations, and convenient omissions. When we read a self-deceiving narrator, we are watching someone do what we all do, just more transparently. The best books in this mode make us uncomfortable because they force us to wonder: where am I deceiving myself?

The third type is the deliberately deceptive narrator. This narrator is actively lying to the reader, withholding information or presenting false information in order to manipulate the reader’s understanding of events. This is the type most commonly associated with the term “unreliable narrator” in popular usage, probably because it is the type most commonly found in thrillers and mysteries, which are the genres where the technique gets the most attention.

Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the most famous early example. When the narrator’s deception is revealed, the reader experiences a retrospective reinterpretation of everything that came before. Every scene, every description, every seemingly innocent observation takes on a new meaning. This is the “twist” version of unreliable narration, and when it is done well, it can be electrifying.

When it is done badly, though, it feels like a cheat. The line between a clever deception and an unfair one is thin. For the twist to work, the reader needs to feel, in retrospect, that the clues were there all along. If the narrator withheld information that the reader had no way of inferring, the revelation feels arbitrary rather than earned. The reader thinks, “Well, of course I did not see that coming. You lied to me.” And they are right to feel cheated.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a modern example that I think handles this well. Both narrators are unreliable in different ways, and the novel is structured so that each unreliability is revealed gradually rather than in a single twist. The reader is constantly recalibrating their understanding, which keeps the reading experience dynamic. You are never on stable ground, and that instability is the point. The novel is about the unreliability of the stories we tell about our relationships, and the narrative structure enacts that theme.

There is a fourth type of unreliable narrator that I find particularly interesting, which is the narrator whose unreliability comes from mental illness, altered consciousness, or some other form of cognitive disruption. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (narrated by a man experiencing hallucinations), and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (narrated by a drug addict) all use narrators whose perception of reality is compromised in ways that make the narrative itself unstable.

These narrators raise an interesting philosophical question: is a narrator “unreliable” if they are reporting their experience accurately, even though their experience does not correspond to external reality? If a narrator is hallucinating and describes the hallucination faithfully, are they lying? I think the answer is no, but the effect on the reader is similar to more conventional unreliability. The reader has to sort out what is real from what is perceived, and that sorting process becomes a central part of the reading experience.

Now, why does this technique endure? Why do writers keep coming back to unreliable narrators, and why do readers keep finding them compelling? I have a few theories.

First, unreliable narration creates active readers. When you trust a narrator, reading is relatively passive. You receive the information, process it, and move on. When you distrust a narrator, you become a detective. You scrutinize every sentence, looking for inconsistencies, omissions, and tells. You are constantly forming hypotheses about what really happened and testing them against new information. This is cognitively engaging in a way that straightforward narration is not, and I think many readers find that engagement pleasurable. It is the same pleasure you get from a good puzzle: the satisfaction of figuring something out through your own effort.

Second, unreliable narration reflects the way we actually experience the world. In real life, nobody has access to objective truth. Every account of every event is filtered through the perspective, biases, and limitations of the person telling it. Reliable narration, where a narrator gives you the straight facts, is actually the artificial convention. Unreliable narration is closer to how human communication actually works. I think readers respond to this, even if they are not consciously aware of it. There is something that feels honest about a dishonest narrator.

Third, unreliable narration enables stories about self-knowledge. The most moving unreliable narrator stories are ultimately about characters confronting the gap between who they think they are and who they actually are. Stevens in The Remains of the Day. Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (yes, I think Nick is unreliable, and I will argue about this with anyone who wants to). These characters are all, in different ways, using their narratives to avoid facing something about themselves. The story is about whether they succeed in that avoidance or whether the truth breaks through.

I think about Nick Carraway more than any other unreliable narrator, because his unreliability is so subtle that many readers miss it entirely. Nick presents himself as the honest observer, the calm center of the story, the one person who sees things clearly. But read the novel carefully and you will notice that Nick is deeply invested in Gatsby’s mythology. He romanticizes Gatsby, minimizes his criminality, and structures the entire narrative to cast Gatsby as a tragic hero rather than a deluded criminal. Nick is not lying, exactly. He is curating. And that kind of curation, where the narrator sincerely believes in the version of events they are presenting while the careful reader can see the gaps, is the most sophisticated form of unreliable narration I know. This connects to something I care about deeply as a publisher, which is the idea that fiction can tell truths that non-fiction cannot. A non-fiction book about self-deception can describe the phenomenon, cite the research, and give you strategies for recognizing it in your own life. A novel with an unreliable narrator can make you experience self-deception from the inside. You can feel yourself being taken in by a narrator’s version of events, and then feel the disorientation of realizing you were wrong. That experiential knowledge is different from intellectual knowledge, and it is something that only fiction can provide.

At ScrollWorks, we have published several novels that use some form of unreliable narration. The Last Archive plays with the question of whether its narrator is remembering events accurately or reconstructing them to serve a particular emotional need. Still Waters features a narrator whose calm, measured tone gradually reveals itself to be a form of avoidance. These books do not use unreliable narration as a gimmick or a twist. They use it as a tool for exploring how people construct meaning from their own experiences, and how those constructions can be both necessary and limiting.

I want to end by pushing back against a criticism of unreliable narration that I hear occasionally, which is that it is manipulative. The argument goes something like this: the writer is deliberately misleading the reader, which is a form of bad faith. The reader agreed to read a story, not to be tricked.

I disagree with this criticism for several reasons. First, all fiction is, at some level, an act of manipulation. The writer is controlling what you know, when you know it, and how you feel about it. Every plot twist, every delayed revelation, every carefully timed emotional beat is a form of manipulation. Unreliable narration is just more transparent about it. Second, the best unreliable narrator fiction is not trying to trick you; it is trying to engage you. The unreliability is not an obstacle between you and the story. It is the story. The experience of reading an unreliable narrator, of questioning, inferring, and gradually piecing together the truth, is the experience the writer intends you to have.

And third, I think there is something deeply respectful about a book that assumes its readers are smart enough to read between the lines. An unreliable narrator demands more from the reader than a reliable one. It says: I trust you to figure this out. I trust you to notice what I am not saying. I trust you to be an active participant in this story rather than a passive recipient. That trust between writer and reader, expressed through the apparent distrust of the narrator, is one of fiction’s great paradoxes. And it is one of the reasons I will never tire of books that ask me to question the voice in my ear.

If you are drawn to this kind of reading experience, I would encourage you to explore our fiction catalog, where several of our titles reward the kind of careful, questioning attention that unreliable narration demands. The best compliment I have received about one of our novels was from a reader who said, “I had to read it twice to really understand it.” That is not a failure of clarity. That is a success of depth.