History Main / InfallibleNarrator

* Justified in C.S. Lewis' TheHorseAndHisBoy. Aravis recounts her entire backstory like this, and Bree explains that Calormenes are taught story-telling in school.
** She isn't entirely infallible, either; by the standards of her culture, she colours her narrative with painful amounts of PurpleProse, even when recounting what another character, who is present, said - causing the said character to comment that she didn't say it in nearly as fancy words.

* Bobby Pendragon, of ''ThePendragonAdventure''. Made especially glaring because writing the story down was one of the major plot points, and we're supposed to believe that in most cases he had hand-written a well planned out eloquent narrative in a single night.

*** Plus, considering how the flumes, territories, and rings all seem to operate on "when you need it it will be there," he might always either just have a lot of time and it just doesn't seem like it, or [[EpilepticTrees time is being warped around him to let him finish a journal]].

* Delios in ''[[ThreeHundred 300]]'', though it's stated he was assigned to tell the story because of the entire army he had the best gift of gab.
** Then again, we don't know if what he's telling is the "real version".
** Or how the hell he knows what happened after he left Leonidas and company. Kinda fits in with the above.

* ''HeartOfDarkness'' is told by Marlow, a ferry boat captain with the descriptive powers of Joseph Conrad.

* The Gulliver at the beginning of ''GulliversTravels'' is [[HeroicBSOD rather different]] to the Gulliver at the end, telling the story.

A {{Framing Device}} is set up in which the hero recounts his adventures in vivid detail. Very vivid detail. So vivid, in fact, that once the story is over and {{Fridge Logic}} has set in the question arises: why is the character, who spends his time fighting {{Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot}}s [[RecycledInSpace in Space]] an equal in writing ability to the (presumably) professional author?

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* This sort of thing's common in [[HGWells H.G. Wells]]' books, as the narrators of ''TheWarOfTheWorlds'' and especially ''First Men in the Moon'' recount every single line of conversation in a dramatic narrative even though they're supposed to be telling the story years later. It reaches the breaking point, though, in ''The Food of the Gods''. The unnamed narrator is clearly meant to be a person, as he describes attending one of the characters' lectures in college, and offers his own speculations about certain mysteries in the story. But then we have the same narrator somehow vividly describing the dreams of the characters, when the characters themselves ''didn't even remember them upon awakening''. As the story goes on, the narrator becomes more and more infallible, until it's impossible to reconcile his knowledge of events with any human perspective.

* Interestingly averted in [[HPLovecraft "The Call of Cthulhu"]], where the narrator is not the one who experienced the events himself but rather a compiler of them. Of the journal and eyewitness account that forms the final and most important narrative he writes that he "cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance" and instead paraphrases it. This gives the description of the final encounter with the ultimate horror a curious mix of immediacy and distance, but certainly justifies the level of detail given and the way it's written.

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* ''HowIMetYourMother'' may be an example of this. Ted has a very clear recollection of several years of his life. Although it is sometimes averted or played with as he does have moments he doesn't remember and stuff. There's still some FridgeLogic as to the degree of detail he seems to use to describe his sex life to his own kids...

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--> '''Security Camera:''' My memory's a little fuzzy, but I think it went exactly like this.

* Averted by Creator/PGWodehouse. As an omniscient narrator, he wrote in his own unique and awesome style, but when writing in the capacity of Literature/BertieWooster, he had a whole different set of quirks. Bertie would often use an odd word and then question if it was indeed the word he wanted -- or forget the word entirely (save its first letter), explain what he meant by anecdote, and then suddenly remember the word a paragraph later.

-->-- '''Professor Farnsworth''', ''{{Futurama}}''[[hottip:*: He has a [[IncrediblyLamePun Memo-Ray]] which lets him remember EVERY detail, making his story infallible, unlike how Farnsworth [[CloudCuckooLander normally]] [[MadScientist is]].

** The same happens in a lot of similar mystery stories by any number of authors, but is averted in one IsaacAsimov Black Widowers story -- [[spoiler:in "The Next Day", the solution is obscured because the guest ''didn't'' have this sort of memory and paraphrased what people said rather than using ExactWords]]. It was played straight in most of the other Black Widowers tales, though.

-->-- '''Professor Farnsworth''', ''{{Futurama}}''[[hottip:*: He has a [[IncrediblyLamePun Memo-Ray]] which lets him remember EVERY detail, making his story infallible, unlike how Farnsworth [[CloudCuckooLander normally]] [[MadScientist is]].]]

* Averted by PGWodehouse. As an omniscient narrator, he wrote in his own unique and awesome style, but when writing in the capacity of Literature/BertieWooster, he had a whole different set of quirks. Bertie would often use an odd word and then question if it was indeed the word he wanted -- or forget the word entirely (save its first letter), explain what he meant by anecdote, and then suddenly remember the word a paragraph later.

* In many of the SherlockHolmes short stories, the famous detective would spend (usually) the first half of the tale interviewing the client, who would effortlessly provide step-by-step, word-for-word descriptions of the events that brought them to seek Holmes out. This can sometimes reach a few weeks back.

* ''Greener Than You Think'' unintentionally draws attention to this when the narrator writes an in-story news article. In accordance with his ego and his tendency to overplay things, he rapidly reaches the heights of PurpleProse, then makes accusations of jealousy against those who criticize his writing. The narration itself, however, is in a plain, unadorned style.
* Lampshaded in ThePrincessDiaries. The narrator remarks on the difficulty of taking a diary to formal occasions (when it won't fit in a purse), and her rampant writing in her diaries is noticed by her friends and family, and the last book recounts, in part, her attempts to get her first novel published.

* Justified in C.S. Lewis' TheHorseAndHisBoy. Aravis recounts her entire backstory like this, and Bree explains that Calormenes are taught story-telling in school.
** She isn't entirely infallible, either; by the standards of her culture, she colours her narrative with painful amounts of PurpleProse, even when recounting what another character, who is present, said - causing the said character to comment that she didn't say it in nearly as fancy words.

* There's a paradoxical example of this in one of Brian Stableford's early novels. In one scene the first-person narrator eloquently describes some disastrous event in precise detail, yet when the character is later asked to describe it to the other characters he tells them he can't recall the exact details because it all happened too fast.

* RonHoward's narration on ArrestedDevelopment is a hallmark of the series. It is always spot-on accurate, insightful and quick to point out the callous lies told by the entire Bluth family on a daily basis.

* WutheringHeights provides a double example: Nelly Dean is able to perfectly recall all the events of the book - over more than 20 years, to boot - and recount them to Lockwood (Handwaved as due to her good memory). Lockwood himself is able to later write her whole tale, including other characters' individual recantations to Nelly, down in his diary from memory.

* Averted by [[PGWodehouse P. G. Wodehouse]]. As an omniscient narrator, he wrote in his own unique and awesome style, but when writing in the capacity of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, he had a whole different set of quirks. Bertie would often use an odd word and then question if it was indeed the word he wanted -- or forget the word entirely (save its first letter), explain what he meant by anecdote, and then suddenly remember the word a paragraph later.

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* The novel ChildOfTheNorthernSpring follows the story of King Arthur from Guinevere's perspective. Gwen turns out to be amazingly accurate in her narration - so much so that she (somehow) manages to recount events even though she claims to have forgotten about them.

* This often happens when characters are recalling something that happened offscreen in stories; it's disturbing how they sound like professional storytellers when they definitely aren't. For example, Warren does this in [[{{Fablehaven}} Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary]], Luke does it in [[MortalInstruments City of Bones]]...

-->-- '''Professor Farnsworth''', ''{{Futurama}}''

* This troper recalls ''TheScarletLetter'' being somewhat disturbing, since the [[CreepyChild small child of the protagonist]] (only about five to six years old by the end of the book) speaks as eloquently (and with the same level of vocabulary) as the adults, who all happen to share the linguistic grace of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

* ''TheNameOfTheWind'' features a protagonist who has since birth been trained to be a professional storyteller, so the author raises the stakes by having him orate the entire novel in real-time to a scribe, talking for an entire day with very few breaks, presumably ad-libbing the entire thing.

* The ''CiaphasCain'' novels have most of the memoirs Cain himself as a straight example, especially given how good his memory must be to remember all the fine details from sorties that happened over a century ago. The chapters taken from the memoirs of Jenith Sulla, meanwhile, [[StylisticSuck are intentional subversions]].