In literature and film, an unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator, the credibility of whose point of view is seriously compromised, possibly by psychological instability or powerful bias. Many novels are narrated by children, whose inexperience makes them inherently unreliable. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, Huck's inexperience leads him to make overly charitable judgments about the characters in the novel; in contrast, Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye, tends to assume the worst.
Many have suggested that all first-person narration, and indeed narration generally, is inescapably unreliable.
Works featuring unreliable narrators
Works of fiction featuring unreliable narrators:
Films told from an unreliable point-of-view (or points-of-view):
