History UnreliableNarrator / Literature

* ''Film/{{Spider}}'' by Patrick [=McGrath=], is narrated by the main character, who is insane. At the end of the book it turns out practically everything he recollected to the reader was heavily warped by his perception. [=McGrath=] specializes in this trope. ''Asylum'' is another excellent example.

* Played with in Creator/StephenKing's "Survivor Type"; the disgraced and shipwrecked surgeon and heroin smuggler Richard Pine is keeping a diary while trapped on a tiny desert island in the middle of the Pacific. The unreliability isn't so much to do with his recounting of his life and circumstances -- though they are skewed by his narcissism, self-centredness, inability to admit fault and general unpleasantness, he freely admits that he intends to destroy the diary if he happens to be rescued and is just recording it to keep his mind occupied, so we're given no reason to believe the fundamentals of his story are false. However, the unreliability stems from the fact that he's trapped on a desert island; he has no way of keeping track of time, has no sources of water or food (except for some seagulls and... [[{{Autocannibalism}} himself]]) and has no shelter, so it's made clear that he's gradually losing track of dates and times and is slowly going mad through starvation, exposure, injury and the trauma of having to eat parts of himself to survive (not to mention an addiction to the heroin he starts using as an anaesthetic).

* The ''Literature/DuneEncyclopedia'' about the ''Franchise/{{Dune}}'' series is a big example of this. It is framed as an Encyclopedia within the ''Dune'' universe, purportedly 5,000 years after the events of the first novel and after the historical record has been greatly altered or lost. Several of the entries either contradict or give a different perspective on the events of the novels. It is up to the reader to determine what account, if any, "really" happened. Particularly interesting is the brief chronological timeline linking "our" time to the setting in ''Dune''. The fictional authors of the Encyclopedia have an idea of what happened in their "distant past" ... but it's [[

*** Harry does ''not'' like Johnny Marcone, and is very quick to attribute nefarious and evil intent even to the most innocuous of Marcone's actions. Marcone is not good guy by any srtetch of the imagination, but not a straight-up villain either. In fact, on a good day Marcone could qualify as an UnscrupulousHero or NominalHero, which only complicates matters for both Harry and the reader.

* The ''Literature/DuneEncyclopedia'' about the ''Franchise/{{Dune}}'' series is a big example of this. It is framed as an Encyclopedia within the ''Dune'' universe, purportedly 5,000 years after the events of the first novel and after the historical record has been greatly altered or lost. Several of the entries either contradict or give a different perspective on the events of the novels. It is up to the reader to determine what account, if any, "really" happened. Particularly interesting is the brief chronological timeline linking "our" time to the setting in ''Dune''. The fictional authors of the Encyclopedia have an idea of what happened in their "distant past" ... but it's [[FutureImperfect heavily filtered]] through the experience of thousands of years of living in a feudal system of government. World War 2, for example, is referred to as a "commercial dispute between House Washington and House Tokyo" within a British Empire that supposedly ruled almost the entire world.
* Matthew Kneale's ''Literature/EnglishPassengers'' is told from the perspective of at least a dozen different narrators. All of their accounts are of varying degrees of reliability, and many are clearly carefully editing or embellishing their stories to make themselves look better or to support their own prejudices.
* Melanie Rawn uses this one to interesting effect in ''Literature/TheExiles''. While not apparent on a casual reading, it's pretty clear that [[spoiler:Collan]]'s background doesn't quite add up. The only certain thing is that Gorynel Desse had something to do with it.
** Actually it's easier to count the things Gorynel Desse ''hasn't'' been running from behind the scenes, wily Chessmaster that he is.
* In ''Literature/TheExorcist'' by William Blatty, a young girl seems possessed by a presence who claims to be the Devil himself. Various developments point more toward a demon called Pazzuzu, but the main and central premise of the novel is that we NEVER fully get proof that there is ANY foreign entity sharing the mind of the young girl. It could all be explained away as (admittedly paranormal) activity originating ONLY from the girl's mind. This horrible doubt is perhaps the central theme of this very powerful and disturbing story -- that the hellish narrator inside Reagan... is only Reagan herself. From there, we are forced to ask (along with the main character) do demons really exist? Hell? God?
* In ''Literature/TheEyesOfMyPrincess'' by Carlos Cuauhtemoc Sanchez, you are led to believe that the book is a a love story that ended in the death of the protagonist's girlfriend. But then, almost at the end, you find out that nothing that happens after a specific event was real. The protagonist wrote fake entries into his diary, because he was disappointed about his crush's real personality.
* ''Literature/FactionParadox'': Brilliantly done in ''Dead Romance'', by Lawrence Miles. The [[FirstPersonSmartass Narrator]] freely admits she has a serious drug problem, and even [[LampshadeHanging hangs a lampshade]] when she takes a time out from describing an alien invasion to muse on the possibility that she's on the worst acid trip of her life.
-->"Maybe this whole book's just a list of the states of mind I was in when I wrote it, like a catalogue of all the things I've been putting into my system. Paranoia for cocaine. Multicoloured planets for acid. I'll be relaxed again soon, so you'll think I'm writing it on dope."
* ''Falstaff'' uses this to play with Creator/WilliamShakespeare's AnachronismStew; the editor of Sir John Fastolfe's memoirs believes they cannot possibly be true because (for example) the drink "sack" was unknown in Fastolfe's time (and therefore, from the editor's perspective, doesn't exist). However, when he reaches the point of denying Fastolfe himself exists, despite being the man's stepson, it becomes open as to which of them is the less reliable.
* Done very well in ''The Family of Pascual Duarte'', from Spanish author Camilo José Cela. Basically it tells the story of an unnamed editor(1) who finds and corrects the "memoirs" that he found in an old church, addressed to a bishop (2), who made a lot of censorship and correction on them beforehand, by Pascual Duarte (3), who admits that he mixed a lot of facts when writing them, along with the more stealthy: a) non linear narration of the events, b) subjectivization and constant digression to gain the favor of the reader and c) manipulation of the contents because of real life problems (lack of paper, tripped and mixed the pages, etc.). The purpose of the "memoirs"? [[spoiler:to gain clerical pardon, staving off his imminent execution]]. That's right, guys. An editor who edits an editor who edits the edited version of Pascual's life. It is subtly implied by the end of the book that the real life author in fact "edited" the story himself, making him another step in the long line of editors the book will have (publisher's editors, academic editors, "reader editor", etc.). This, by context, was a sort of TakeThat to Franquism, along with a few subtle political/social references/criticism (which make a big part of the novel objective).
* ''Literature/FannyHill'' also features an unreliable narrator. Fanny's description of prostitution is wildly unrealistic even for the 18th century. Some also see her ConvenientMiscarriage as a lie told to cover a Convenient Abortion, as Fanny had been recently deserted by her patron and was broke, owed an astronomical sum to her landlady (an abortionist), and had no way to earn money outside of prostitution -- impossible while pregnant in the 1740s. Keep in mind, though, that Cleland wrote ''Fanny Hill'' so he could pay his way out of debtor's prison, and he may have written the story based on unrealistic and melodramatic "life stories" told to him by the prostitutes he met in prison which he wasn't experienced enough to see through. In other words, Fanny may have been unreliable despite the writer's intentions, not because of them.
* The most prominent example in ''Literature/FiftyShadesOfGrey'' is when, in first person present tense, Ana gives a detailed explanation of her surroundings and right afterwards claims that she doesn't get a chance to see what her surroundings look like.
* ''Literature/FightClub'' has the unnamed narrator who turns out to [[spoiler:have a SplitPersonality disorder and is also Tyler Durden]]. He doesn't realize he's unreliable until two thirds of the way through the book -- and when he finds out and tries to convince everybody else, [[CassandraTruth no one believes him]].
* ''Literature/FlowersForAlgernon'' has the mentally challenged narrator Charlie Gordon, whose disability means he often doesn't completely grasp the situations he encounters. For example, the "friends" he hangs out with repeatedly humiliate Charlie without his batting an eye.
* ''Literature/ForWantOfANail''. The entire book is written as a history of an alternate world where America lost the Revolutionary War, eventually breaking into the United States of America and Mexico. After such lush detail into the history of this world, the book ends with a "critique" by a scholar that notes that much of the history presented is biased and omitting key details and moments.
* ''Literature/{{Frankenstein}}'': Many readers and critics have wondered the validity of the three narrators of the story: Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and his Creature, in general. This is because the entire story is a transcript the sailor Walton wrote to his sister, Margaret. Victor himself is near death from hypothermia and telling the events from his youth years ago. The chapters showing the story from the Creature's perspective are him simply telling Victor the story of what happened after his creation (such as "After you left me") instead of "After he was left behind"), and these chapters come from a single campfire conversation. However, Victor is noted throughout the book not to trust the Creature, referring to him names such as "the fiend" and "the demon" and being paranoid that he is watching him and will kill his loved ones, which brings into question of how true any of them are. The Creature promises to give him receipts to prove the validity of his claims, but this is never referenced by Victor afterwards, and this cannot confirm the entirety of his story. Victor himself, notes that he forgot several events from the story, such as his time with his friend, Henry Clerval, and leaves how he ultimately created the Creature very ambiguous.
%%* Read ''Literature/GentlemenPreferBlondes'' for a comedic (if archaically sexist) take on this trope.
* In ''Gilligan's Wake'' (by Tom Carson), all the narrators have a trace of this, but the Professor takes the cake. For one thing, he commits [[spoiler:serial rape]] but his narcissism convinces him that this an act of generosity to his inferiors (who are, naturally, grateful). For another thing, he ends the story believing that [[spoiler:he, like every other American, is a {{kaiju}}]]: it is strongly implied that he is really [[spoiler:completely out of touch with reality, and living on the street]]. He is so confused and forgetful at this point that it retroactively turns the detailed, if slanted, nature of the preceding narrative into a very odd mixture of unreliable narrator and implausibly InfallibleNarrator.
* Tom Wingfield from ''Theatre/TheGlassMenagerie''. He seems reliable until [[spoiler:he abandons Amanda and Laura]]. That, combined with his final speech, demonstrate that he has strong motives to justify his actions and put himself in a positive light. In fact, we only see the ending of the play from Tom's perspective -- and even though it is somewhat sad, it's suspiciously redemptive for everyone. Also, if Tom was in the right, why is his conscience plagued by memories of Laura?
* ''Literature/GoingAfterCacciato'': About halfway through the book, you realize that [[spoiler:Paul Berlin is probably still in the observation tower, and the whole story is just a daydream to excuse himself of complicity in the death of Cacciato, who (it appears) the squad killed to hush him up.]] But again, it's postmodern, so the question is: does any of this matter?
* In ''Literature/GoneGirl'', Nick Dunne leaves out numerous details throughout the story, making the reader suspicious about ''how'' unreliable he is, and whether or not he is behind his wife Amy's disappearance. [[spoiler:It turns out that Amy is even more unreliable than her husband, as her diary was deliberately fabricated with lies so that she could frame her husband.]]
* John Dowell in Creator/FordMadoxFord's ''Literature/TheGoodSoldier'' cannot be trusted about anything, whether it be his awareness of his wife's infidelity or his [[spoiler:culpability in Ashburnham's suicide.]]
* In ''Literature/TheGospelOfLoki'', Loki describes his own autobiography as a "tissue of lies". He adds that "it's at least as true as the official version and, dare I say it, more entertaining."
* In Creator/CSLewis' ''Literature/TheGreatDivorce'', the damned will do this about their lives if they can. When talking with the Bright Ones, they get (gently) called on this, but on the bus, the Tousle-Headed Poet presents his life as NeverMyFault, even though it is clear he is a lazy, untalented moocher, and on their arrival, a grumbling woman blames her death on everyone around her at the time, someone should have managed to save her, although it was certain she was gravely ill -- she complains of the surgery, but during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, when this is set, operations were a matter of last resort.
* ''Literature/TheGreatGatsby'':
** Nick Carraway: most events that he describes you can accept are true, but there's one point where he claims to have said something to Gatsby that it's possible he merely ''wishes'' he'd said. It also seems possible that he's intentionally omitted some pieces of information about Gatsby due to his desire to see and portray Gatsby as in a favourable light.
** The scene when Nick gets drunk and starts losing time. It starts with "keep your hands off the lever" and somehow jumps to "[Mr. [=McKee=]] was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear". The reader is left to wonder if Nick is gay or bisexual, but Nick never mentions it (he probably doesn't know what happened either).
** One of the first things he says is how nonjudgmental he is. Followed by about 200 pages in which he leaves pretty much no other character unjudged. Cleverly mocked in ''Webcomic/HarkAVagrant'' [[http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=259 here (7th strip down)]].
** In fact, Nick explicitly states that the reason he doesn't judge people is essentially because it's not their fault that they're morally inferior to him.
** The only character he doesn't judge (or judge too harshly) is Gatsby, putting him on a pedestal. This has made some readers question if perhaps Nick only remembers Gatsby as a Messianic archetype because they were friends, while vilifying Daisy, Tom, and Jordan because they each had a hand in his death.
* Lemuel Gulliver from ''Literature/GulliversTravels'' becomes one by the fourth journey. He describes [[StrawVulcan the Houyhnhnms]] as the perfect civilization, despite their arrogance, elitism, and genocidal tendencies. Meanwhile, the Portuguese sea captain who does nothing but help Gulliver for no reason other than Christian charity is described as sinful and outright monstrous.
* In ''Literature/TheHandmaidsTale'': Offred, and Gilead in general. In ''The Handmaid's Tale'' the story ends with a pregnant Offred being told by Nick to go with a group of Guardians into a black van, unsure of whether they are the Eyes that shall execute or torture her, or the rebel group, Mayday, which will protect her. An epilogue reveals that a century later, a group of tapes were found, called "The Handmaid's Tale" by a group of college professors, Pieixoto and Maryann Crescent Moon. They were recorded by a woman who said she was a Handmaid named "Offred". However, the professors note that her version of events is very inaccurate with the Gilead history. For instance, she says that Serena Joy is a stage name, and that Mrs. Waterford's real name is Pam, but the professors say that if Serena Joy were the stage name of her mistress, then her true name would be Thelma, which means Offred either misheard her name or didn't remember or write it down. This makes the professors wonder if perhaps, Offred changed her name or her story, in order to protect the identities of her loved ones in case the tapes were discovered by the wrong people, which is why she never says her true name once. The professor even goes as far as to question the validity and authenticity of the tapes in general.
** Gilead itself isn't much better. The country is very rooted in a fundamental Christian faith: prenatal care is outlawed on the grounds of abortion and many of their laws come from a QuoteMine. While the narrator is scared of Gilead, there is the constant air that like a fascist nation, Gilead is trying to use propaganda to keep a sense of normalcy.
* ''Literature/HarryPotter'' has the titular hero as third-person narrator, except in a handful of chapters early on in a few of the books.[[note]] His uncle Vernon in the first, someone who worked for Voldemort's paternal family in the fourth, the Muggle Prime Minister and Narcissa Malfoy in the sixth, and Snape at a Death Eater meeting in the seventh[[/note]] However, his own biases and immaturity often color the narrative:
** Lampshaded twice in ''Literature/HarryPotterAndThePhilosophersStone'': in Gringotts, the narration says the path is full of stalactites and stalagmites, then Harry confesses he can't tell the difference between them. Later: "Perhaps it was Harry's imagination, after all he'd heard about Slytherin, but he thought they looked like an unpleasant lot."
** The series never alludes to Dumbledore's sexuality because Harry, being a somewhat obtuse teenage boy, never even thinks about the love life of his aged mentor. Even when one of the Headmaster's school friends makes a fairly overt crack about it, the comment goes right over Harry's head. An elderly relative of Ron’s says in the same conversation there were “always strange rumors” about him and it goes over Harry’s head as well. Similarly, Pottermore reveals [=McGonagall=] was a widow for the duration of the series, which the books don't even ''hint'' at.
* Invoked in ''Literature/{{Hieroglyphics}}''. Machen wrote down the Hermit's theories from memory and thinks he may have forgotten to include some things.
* Sarah Caudwell's (very funny) four legal mysteries are narrated by ''Literature/HilaryTamar'' (of unknown gender). While the stories can be considered "accurate", the narrator's roles and motivations are always given a very shiny gloss (I just happened to need a book in that room, and I just happened to need one that was low down behind the sofa. Oh no, now they've entered the room and started talking about the mystery without realising that I'm here).
* ''The History of Love'': near the end, Leo explains how he's an unreliable narrator; it also turns out that Bruno was [[spoiler:DeadAllAlong]], which casts the last scene with him in a different light.
* Apparently Creator/DouglasAdams retconned the divergences between the book, radio show, TV show, stage play, etc. of ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' by explaining that the source of the accounts was Zaphod Beeblebrox, about as unreliable as a narrator can get, who never remembered the story the same way twice.
** One section of [[Radio/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy the radio series]], involving Zaphod's incredible escape from a particularly nasty fate, is explicitly based on Zaphod's own account. It begins:
--->Many stories are told of Zaphod Beeblebrox's journey to the Frogstar. Ten percent of them are ninety-five percent true, fourteen percent of them are sixty-five percent true, thirty-five percent of them are only five percent true, and all the rest of them are told by Zaphod Beeblebrox.
** Approximately half of the first series of the radio drama was negated when Trillian dismissed the storyarc as one of Zaphod's psychotic episodes. [[spoiler:Although it later turned out she was wrong.]]
* In ''Literature/HoratioHornblower'', one of the chief faults Hornblower finds with himself is his "cowardice", namely that whenever he goes into action he's terrified of being mutilated or killed. Apart from the fact that he's [[CowardlyLion not actually a coward because he always does it anyway]], the third-person narration never has him thinking about this while he is actually in battle, only anticipation or hindsight. In one book he grabs a howitzer shell that's landed on his ship and snuffs it out before it can blow up without even thinking about it, but later he's viciously taking himself to task for having been scared of what would have happened if he didn't.
* Duff, the main character in ''Literature/HowToSurviveAZombieApocalypse'', is a narcissist, has an ego the size of the moon and is convinced she is smarter than the whole Squad combined. Sometimes. She also has a penchant to exaggerate things and is rather biased, resulting in a rather peculiar... perception of the whole story.
* ''Literature/TheHungerGames'': Played with both in-universe and from a meta perspective. As an unremarkable teenage girl from the poorest district in Panem, Katniss Everdeen is not exactly up to speed on the true history of her country or it's current political machinations. This is partly by design, as the government makes deliberate efforts to keep information reaching citizens murky and minimal. There are even a few moments in the series - such as in ''Literature/CatchingFire'' when she realizes the misinformation spread about District 13 - when Katniss understands that she doesn't have the full picture and wonders what the truth is.
** The series is also written from an insular first-person perspective, with Katniss narrating the entire trilogy in real time. This forces readers to experience the story from the same limited perspective that she does, creating an incomplete picture of what is really happening with other characters. When big reveals happen, they seem all the more dramatic, since we never get any real idea of what anyone except Katniss is thinking or feeling.
* The ''Literature/{{Idlewild}}'' series:
** The narrator of ''Literature/{{Idlewild}}'' is an amnesiac whose memory doesn't track further than the first page of the book. He claims to recover some memories over time, but they're rosy interpretations that support his existing perspective.
** ''Literature/{{Edenborn}}'' uses SwitchingPOV to track several different characters, each of whose perspectives taint the narrative (though Penny is definitely the worst).
* The protagonist Ted in ''Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream'' says that [[CureYourGays Benny]], [[TheEeyore Gorrister]], [[ThoseWackyNazis Nimdok]] and [[BlackAndNerdy Ellen]] all hate him because he's the youngest and because AM effects him the least. He also says Ellen claims to have had sex only twice before being brought down into AM, yet in the game she was both married and [[spoiler:a rape victim.]]
* ''Literature/ILucifer'' can likely claim having one of if not ''the'' most unreliable narrator a person could hope to find in Lucifer himself. Well, Literature/TheBible was admittedly ''one-sided''.
* In ''Literature/{{Illuminatus}}'', the narrator's identity is kept secret throughout most of the series as it meanders back and forth through time, through the viewpoints of various characters, some of whom do not actually exist, and through a web of hallucination, myth, and deception.
* ''Literature/AnInstanceOfTheFingerpost'' has several narrators, all of whom are various varieties of unreliable narrator. One is insane, one is a xenophobe who imputes his own nasty motives on to others, one is relatively accurate except where his own identity is concerned, and one is a nice guy who seems fairly honest and objective, until you learn that he harbors an unusual belief about a key character that casts doubt on his descriptions of several scenes.
* If one is familiar with the events of ''Series/ImAlanPartridge'' (and to a lesser extent the other series in the Franchise/AlanPartridge universe), the hideous unreliability of Alan as narrator in his predictably self-serving autobiography ''Literature/IPartridgeWeNeedToTalkAboutAlan'' is glaringly and hilariously obvious. Instances of Alan's cowardice, selfishness, incompetence, unpopularity, borderline sociopathy and general loathsome inadequacy as a human being are (unconvincingly) turned by Alan into tales of towering heroism, and instances where even he cannot find a way to bend reality to such an extent are lathered in incredibly obvious BlatantLies, generous helpings of NeverMyFault and {{Suspiciously Specific Denial}}s which might as well be the honest truth for how nakedly transparent they are. For example, Alan's in "reality" humiliating encounter with Tony Hayers in the BBC restaurant is somehow turned into a moral victory for Alan where everyone watching gives him a SlowClap at his moment of triumph, and his encounter with stalker Jed Maxwell becomes a surreal, OTT Bond-esque fight scene with a well-muscled Alan beating Jed to a squealing pulp (instead of, as "actually" happened, Alan being physically humiliated, somehow sweet-talking his way outside and then fleeing in terror). While less reliant on pre-existing Alan stories as ''I, Partridge'' (though some segments of the feature film ''Film/AlanPartridgeAlphaPapa'' are touched upon, in predictably self-serving fashion), the sequel follow-up ''Nomad'' continues Alan's tendencies towards, at most generous, unreliability.
* ''Literature/JessicaDarling'' is prone to leaving out things she doesn't want to talk about, making conjectures with absolute certainty that turn out to be entirely false, and of course talking at length about [[CoolLoser how ugly and unpopular she is while people are constantly praising her and boys fawning over her.]] She's not entirely unaware of it, though; at one point she flat out wonders how she can be so [[TheSnarkKnight incapable of ignoring anything even if she'd be happier not seeing it,]] yet at the same time completely miss so much. Another character tells her that while she is indeed quite perceptive, she's also prone to making up her mind about what people are like and refusing to believe that they could ever [[CharacterDevelopment change]].
* ''Literature/JohnDiesAtTheEnd'' is mostly narrated by one protagonist, David, and the majority of the book involves David recounting unlikely supernatural adventures to a reporter. A small part of the book (involving important events that the narrator didn't witness firsthand) is instead told by David's best friend, John, and this portion has a suspiciously high occurrence of backflips, as well as a chase scene that John resolves by "stealing a nearby horse". As David points out early on, "If you know John, you'll take the details for what they're worth. Please also remember that, where John claims to have 'gotten up at three-thirty' to perform this investigation, it was far more likely he was still up and somewhat drunk from the night before." David himself even admits that his version of events is only "mostly true." And let's not forget, [[spoiler:the title is a bald-faced lie.]]
-->I did it according to this equation:\\
@@l = E × ∞ @@\\
Which can be translated as "One small lie saves an infinite amount of explanation." I use it all the time. I've used it on you already.
* Creator/RobertCharlesWilson's ''[[Literature/JulianComstock Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America]]'' has a lot of fun with this trope, with the narrator simply not noticing important things about his friends, not being able to tell reality from propaganda, and often being manipulated and played, without even realising it.
* ''Literature/TheKaneChronicles'': The FramingDevice is the two siblings, Carter and Sadie Kane, recording their most recent adventures. They switch off every chapter and frequently comment on what the other has said. This ranges from side comments (such as one telling their sibling to stop laughing) to outright correcting things the other sibling has said. However, the overarching story is assumed to be pretty accurate. Things just may not have gone as well as they say.
* ''Literature/TheKharkanasTrilogy'': The story is narrated by the poet Gallan to another poet, Fisher kel Tath, and in the prelude to ''Forge of Darkness'', Gallan flat-out admits to not be telling the truth and inventing things as ge goes when he doesn't know what actually happened or to intensify the impact of the events:
-->No matter; what I do not recall I shall invent. [...] And if I spoke of sacrifices, I lied.
* "The Repairer of Reputations", a part of the ''Literature/TheKingInYellow'' features this. From the get-go, the narrator, Hildred, mentions that he suffered a head injury that led him to be committed to an asylum before being released after a couple of years, but he then vehemently insist that he was unjustly detained and that he was never insane, meaning that his account of events is already untrustworthy from the beginning. And when end reveals that [[spoiler:he died in an asylum the previous day]], large portions of plot become extremely questionable. To top it off, he even fairly early reveals that he read the in-universe "The King In Yellow", which is a BrownNote that drives you insane.
* Ikkun from Nisioisin's ''Kubishime Romanticist'' never outright lied to the reader, but frequently left out important details, such as the reason he was feeling sick upon seeing [[spoiler:Mikoko]]'s body. It was because he had [[spoiler:eaten the evidence that would incriminate her as the murderer, and only because he had been the one to drive her to suicide in the first place.]]
* ''The Lace Reader'' begins with the first-person narrator introducing herself as a SelfProclaimedLiar.
-->(''Opening lines.'') "My name is Towner Whitney. Well, that's not exactly true. My first name is Sophya. I lie a lot. Never believe me."
** And the book gets less reliable from there. In the end, [[spoiler:it is revealed that her twin sister Lyndley's suicide, which drove her motivations throughout the book, never happened; her real sister's name was Lindsey, and she died before she was born. Mae did not give her up to Emma, Mae never was her real mother in the first place, Emma was. Cal's abuse of Lyndley was actually directed at Towner.]] Besides these revelations, it's nearly impossible to tell what else the narrator might have lied about.
* British statesman Lord Chesterfield points out a problem with telling about RealLife events in ''Literature/LettersToHisSon'': "A man who has been concerned in a transaction will not write it fairly; and a man who has not, cannot." (letter 37)
* Creator/JustineLarbalestier's ''Literature/{{Liar|2009}}'': It's so bad that she actually lies about lying. [[spoiler:First she mentions her brother Jordan often, then she says she made him up, then she mentions that he did exist but he died.]] To the point where she says ''she's'' not even sure what really happened at the end.
* The TwistEnding of ''Literature/LifeOfPi'' plays with this trope: [[spoiler:At the end of the novel, the narrator offers an alternate (and far more disturbing) version of the events thus far, and tells the audience to choose which story they want to believe.]]
* The ''Literature/LittlePrincess'' book "I Feel Sick" frequently describes Princess as sick when she's only PlayingSick.
* Creator/VladimirNabokov's ''Literature/{{Lolita}}'' uses this narrative device after the John Ray, Jr.-penned prologue; Humbert's unreliability calls into question the major plot elements of the text -- does he ''really'' miss Annabel Leigh, or is it just a pedophilia justification? Even so, should his (probable) love for Leigh excuse his horrific actions? Does he really love and care for Dolores, or is she just an object to him? (Note the nickname, "Dolly".) Was she actually sexually precocious, or did he project his own desires onto her? We could go on and on. Entire theses have been written about this.
* In ''Literature/TheLongingOfShiinaRyo'' WordOfGod and the sections narrated by other characters indicated that Shin-tsu may be this. Or maybe they're the unreliable ones.
* ''Literature/LunarPark''. The narrator is a writer named after the author of the novel, Creator/BretEastonEllis, who is an unreliable narrator, because he describes things the other characters don't see or feel. The main character is abusing drugs; some of the hallucinations might be to some extent related to that. Also, there is a intertextual reference: Ellis' character has apparently also written a novel titled ''American Psycho'' and he says: "Patrick Bateman is an unreliable narrator."
* Ivy Gamble of ''Literature/MagicForLiars'' opens the narrative by saying she’ll tell the truth in this story, but she lies to herself so often that it bleeds through to the text. It gets to a point where it is obvious when she does it.
* The French SciFi novel ''{{Literature/Malevil}}'' is presented as the memoirs of Emmanuel Comte [[AfterTheEnd following]] WorldWarIII. He doesn't have perfect memory of all events and so his friend Thomas provides correcting notes after certain chapters. In one circumstance, Thomas corrects what would be a glaring PlotHole to anybody in-universe reading the memoir: Emmanuel doesn't mention a single word about the solution to their {{Polyamory}} situation. However, Thomas isn't necessarily more reliable, as some of his notes are less correcting of mistakes and omissions and more arguing of opinions. At one point, Thomas decides he needs to debate Emmanuel's assessment of the only woman in their group and contradict his praise of her intelligence and beauty.
* ''Literature/TheMarvellousLandOfSnergs'': Both Jester Bradley and Mother Meldrum paint King Kiul as a terrible tyrant who has done all kind of unspecified but horrific things. When the main characters get to meet him, he turns out to be an incredibly reasonable and fair person, and it becomes clear that he was being slandered by liars with a personal grudge.
* Anika in ''Literature/{{MARZENA}}'' makes it clear multiple times throughout the story that she wasn't there when it happened. She's just a [[AuthorAvatar ghost writer]] transcribing down the thoughts and memories of the characters. As for what really happened? Who knows!? Although... the story may be fictitious, but the science is real!
* [[Creator/RobertAntonWilson R.A. Wilson's]] novel ''The Masks of Illuminati'' gives a human narrator, Sir John Babcock, who is fairly reliable, albeit emotionally loaded when it comes to his own experiences, but he keeps narrating events that he didn't personally witness without a hint of suspicion or doubt despite of how incredible they are. [[spoiler:Most of them aren't even remotely true.]]
* In ''Literature/{{Merlin}}'' by Robert Nye, CharacterNarrator Merlin admits he is telling the story while completely mad. One chapter involves Merlin facilitating [[BrotherSisterIncest Arthur and Morgana's relationship]]. The next chapter has him explain that it never happened, he just induced a hallucination in Arthur (and himself, hence the ExactWords "If this is a dream, lord, it is one I share with you")... and then immediately reveals that this is what he ''thought'' happened, but Morgana had other ideas. There are a few other moments when Merlin hides what's going on, thinks he knows what is going on but doesn't or both simultaneously. He has, after all, gone mad and is telling this story to a pig.
* Holly, the narrator of Laura Kasischke's ''Mind of Winter'', fights with her adopted teenage daughter Tatiana while trying to get the house ready for Christmas. But there are two problems. First, Holly also struggles with her repressed knowledge that [[spoiler:Tatiana is not the girl whom she and her husband originally intended to adopt from a Siberian orphanage.]] Second, as the ending reveals, Tatiana [[spoiler:died of an undiagnosed heart defect on Christmas morning, leaving it unclear if Holly is interacting with both her ghost and that of the other girl, or has been DrivenToMadness out of guilt.]]
* Ishmael, the FirstPersonPeripheralNarrator from ''Literature/MobyDick'', is often suggested to be one, mostly due to the famous opening line "Call me Ishmael", which has been the subject of considerable analysis. The thinking generally goes like this: Saying "Call me Ishmael" instead of "My name is Ishmael" may imply that Ishmael isn't his true name, and if he didn't tell the truth about his name, then you can't be certain he told the truth about anything else after that.
** There is also the issue of the narrator's frequent digressions about whales; much of which flatly contradict the established science of the time. A fact that the narrator acknowledges at one point, stating that he prefers his beliefs on the subject over the general consensus; and further cementing his unreliability.
* In ''Literature/{{Mog}}'', the story is told from the perspective of the eponymous cat, so you sometimes get things like "the snake spat" when it was actually a fire hose, and "there was a flappy thing" when it was actually a marquee.
* Creator/DanielDefoe's fictional memoir ''Literature/MollFlanders'' is an early case of a narrator who is unreliable on more than one plane. Superficially, Moll puts herself in the best possible light no matter what, either by glossing over the enormousness of her crimes or by blaming the victims, but her story is also logically inconsistent and ahistorical. She leaves her purportedly well-loved children in Colchester in the 1640s -- in other words, in a war zone -- to traipse off to America on a whim. Her "older brother", with whom she inadvertently commits incest and has a child, must be younger than her if her mother's story is true. Despite living in London in the 1660s, she does not recall the Plague, the Dutch invasion, or the Great Fire.
* The PinkertonDetective who narrates Creator/AnthonyHorowitz's Franchise/SherlockHolmes novel ''Literature/{{Moriarty}}'' omits just a few important details [[spoiler:-- for example, his actual identity --]] and trots out ExactWords on more than one occasion.
* In ''Literature/TheMothDiaries'', the entire story revolves around the unnamed narrator not being reliable. You get to work it out for yourself, because you don't actually find out whether Ernessa is [[spoiler:a vampire or not]]. There are also some very interesting deaths in the plot, and it's fun to work out whether they happened and how much of it was psychosis.
* Disney once released a short series of children's books called ''My Side of the Story''. In them, the Disney villains claim that the events of the films were inaccurate and gave their own rather suspect accounts of what actually happened. For example, the Evil Queen insists that she gave Snow White the apple out of worry for her nutrition and Maleficent claims she just wanted to hire Aurora as an intern for her textile factory.
* ''Literature/TheNameOfTheWind'' by Patrick Rothfuss is written largely as a flashback told in the first-person perspective by the main character, Kvothe, and there are hints that it's not wholly reliable. One of Kvothe's companions remarks that a certain woman who shows up frequently in the story (and is the object of Kvothe's affection) wasn't as beautiful as described, among others. He actually says a character won't shows up, but uses ExactWords to lie. Further, he's just wrong from time to time. Because the narrative's descriptions of people are his own, he'll say things the audience later realizes are obviously untrue -- such as when he describes his LoveInterest as "naïve" or "innocent"...
* ''The Noble Prize'' by German bestseller author Andreas Eschbach. Justified. The book plays mainly in the scientific community, and the narrator brings it onto himself by violating two important principles of scientific research: by ignoring Occam's razor, and fitting the data to the theory.
* ''Literature/NotesFromUnderground'' by Creator/FyodorDostoevsky is one of the first modern uses of the unreliable narrator, though it's not the TropeMaker since ''Literature/ArabianNights'' and ''Literature/TheCanterburyTales'' employed it long before.
* The beginning of ''Number 9 Dream'' features the narrator recounting a bunch of crazy action-movie adventures that turn out not to have happened. Once you get to the meat of the story this habit seems to stop, but given the narrator's established tendency to mix fact with fantasy and the many things he accomplishes over the course of the book, from the plausible-yet-mildly-improbable ([[spoiler:finding his DisappearedDad by complete coincidence, patching things up with his estranged mother, dating a beautiful musical prodigy (despite being kind of a loser himself)]]) to the cinematically unlikely ([[spoiler:surviving being thrown into the middle of a conflict between two Yakuza factions, being instrumental in exposing a huge organization of organ thieves using a document given to him by a mysterious private detective he met only once and a program given to him by a friend who happens to be a master hacker who's just been scouted by the American government after hacking into their most secret files]]), the reader is left wondering whether any of it actually happened.
* In Creator/DeanKoontz's ''Literature/OddThomas'', Odd specifically says that he was asked to be an unreliable narrator, citing Christie's ''Literature/TheMurderOfRogerAckroyd'', but indicating he doesn't really want to do that. In the end, though, [[spoiler:Odd says that he really has been misrepresenting things; whenever he said he and his girlfriend Stormy were destined for each other, he was speaking as his past self; by the end of the book Stormy is dead and they obviously are not living happily ever after.]] He handwaves the whole sequence at the end by saying that [[spoiler:both his parents are insane, and he expects madness runs in his family.]]
* Creator/UrsulaKLeGuin's short story ''Literature/TheOnesWhoWalkAwayFromOmelas'' uses this to [[YouBastard show the readers their own biases]]. The story is narrated by someone living in a utopian society, who invites the reader to visit. The narrator repeatedly goads the reader with questions about what sort of flaws there could possibly be in a utopia, before revealing that it is, quite literally, PoweredByAForsakenChild. It's never made clear whether they are telling the truth or simply making this up so the reader will be more inclined to believe them.
* Ernesto Sabato's ''Literature/OnHeroesAndTombs'' has a self-containing chapter, ''Report on the blind''. It's about a man who [[AncientConspiracy believes the world is being controlled by a cabal of blind people]] and tries to locate their secret lair under the streets of Buenos Aires. Due to the fantastical nature of his story, in contrast with the realism of the rest of the book, it's impossible to know what was true and what was just a paranoid delusion.
* There is a consistency to some of the facts in ''Literature/OnlyRevolutions''. That is, certain events don't change between the two viewpoints the book is narrated from. However, for the vast majority of details, like names and places, those shift even in the same story. Is the Italian cook's name Viatitonacci or Viazazonacci or Viapiponacci? Is he even Italian? [[MindScrew I don't know!]]
* ''Literature/PaleFire'' deals with an unreliable narrator in Charles Kinbote. But in Kinbote's case, he is not only narrating multiple stories, he is also interpreting (and ''mis''interpreting) the poem of fellow university professor John Shade. But the above is only true if you assume that John Shade is a real person and that he wrote the poem in the novel. Or if you assume that Kinbote is who he says/thinks he is. You might want to also double-check who has claimed to write what part of the novel. It's safe to say that Nabokov loved this trope.
* ''The Perfectionists'' and ''The Good Girls'' by Sara Shepard turn out to have not one, but ''two'' of these among the five narrators. They tell the story of five girls who discuss how they'd murder the various people they hate, only to have those murders actually happen in the way they describe. The TwistEnding to ''The Good Girls'' reveals that [[spoiler:one of the girls, Parker, is actually long dead and exists only as a SplitPersonality of her best friend, Julie. The "Parker" persona was the one committing the murders, but she'd blocked out the memory of it, meaning that neither personality was aware of the killer's identity.]]
* Played with in ''Literature/ThePrincessBride'', in which the author uses a false version of himself to provide background for his editing of the (nonexistent) original novel. Weirdly enough, though, especially in the introductions he periodically adds on for various anniversary editions (particularly about the movie), he will often reference real people and occasionally tell real anecdotes about them as well as real anecdotes about his life and then segue into an anecdote that, if you know that the book is wholly fictional, couldn't possibly have happened. Within the false original book, it is implied that the author, though he was purportedly writing a novel based on true events, did not quite know when to stick to the truth, when not, when to add in his whole long polemics about trees, etc. Especially in the 30th anniversary intro, when we learn that he was considering changing aspects of the story (and may have actually done so) in order to cater to what he and others wanted to hear, we question, even upon finding out that there is a museum with artifacts of the story, how much of it REALLY happened.
* This is thoroughly and effectively explored in James Hogg's ''Literature/ThePrivateMemoirsAndConfessionsOfAJustifiedSinner''. The memoir is framed as a FictionalDocument. The Sinner himself is a religious fanatic who portrays himself as a righteous Calvinist martyr and the people he's killed as horrible, horrible people. He's seemingly helped by the Devil himself, but then again, he might just be insane. The editor who researches the events in the Sinner's journal exposes many falsehoods and contradictions, but he himself isn't completely reliable either -- because of his strictly rationalist outlook, he cannot reconcile the seemingly supernatural events described and tries to explain them away, even though some things don't quite make sense as a result.
* Creator/ElizabethBear's ''Literature/ThePrometheanAge'': The unreliable first-person narrator of ''Blood and Iron'' is ''so'' unreliable that, for the first third or so of the book, [[spoiler:she]] narrates everything in third person, including scenes in which [[spoiler:she herself]] is present. (It works, but this is definitely the Don't Try This at Home school of writing.)
* The narrator in ''Literature/ThePyatQuartet'' is definitely not presenting events honestly, though it's never clear how much he's outright lying and how much he's [[SelfServingMemory genuinely convinced himself that things happened in a way that flatters his ego the most.]] He's also a HorribleJudgeOfCharacter who keeps misunderstanding the motivations of people around him.
* Megan Whalen Turner's ''Literature/TheQueensThief'':
** In Book 1, ''The Thief'', the narrator, Gen, tells the story in such a way that the reader assumes he is an ignorant, dirt-poor, none-too-bright street thief being forced to help the other characters steal a precious artifact. Only at the end does it become clear that though Gen has never actually lied in his telling of the story, certain omissions and misdirections have allowed him to obscure the fact that [[spoiler:he is a queen's cousin, a hereditary master thief, and the [[TheChessmaster highly intelligent orchestrator of everything that has occurred in the story thus far]].]]
** This continues in the sequels, as characters interpret Gen's actions without knowing what is really going on is his head. This leads to some very interesting bits of confusion, though Attolia can be forgiven for not realizing that the man she [[spoiler:mutilated is still completely in love with her]].
* Lampshaded by Bunny Manders, TheWatson of the ''Literature/{{Raffles}}'' stories: "I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dwelt unduly on the redeeming side."
* ''Literature/TheRedTent'' is narrated by Dinah. She tells the readers that she's retelling a lot of stuff that her mom and aunts have told her, from memory, and that it's been a long time, so some of the details might not be ''quite'' accurate.
* The narrator of "Literature/TheRedTower" is desperate to convince you, the reader, that the Red Tower exists, despite dismissing descriptions of it as delusional and acknowledging that no one else has ever knowingly seen or spoken of it. Everyone is always talking about the Red Tower, in one way or another, and ''only'' about the Red Tower, and only the narrator has realised it.
* The Caitlín Kiernan novel ''Literature/{{The Red Tree|2009}}'' takes this trope to [[ExaggeratedTrope insane levels]] with not just one but at least three and at some points five levels of unreliable narration. First, there is the main character Sarah: the story is told in the form of her journal, and she's clearly losing it (a note at the beginning mentions she killed herself after the events in the story). Then there is the unknown person who collected Sarah's journal and mailed it to her editor. Finally, there is the editor herself, who is distinctly coy in her note about any details that might confirm or deny Sarah's story. If that weren't enough, there are long sections of the book where Sarah is supposedly quoting from a manuscript she found. The author of this manuscript is also of questionable sanity, and there are several places where he is quoting from sources of questionable veracity. Not only is it impossible to tell if anything in this book actually happened outside anyone's imagination, it isn't even possible to tell whose imagination it might have been. It works, though.
* In ''Literature/TheRemainsOfTheDay'', Stevens's repression of his emotions in all situations results in many moments where even as it's incredibly obvious what he must be feeling, he refuses to acknowledge having any feelings at all -- his father's death, for instance.
* Marcel Proust's ''Remembrance of Things Past''/''In Search of Lost Time'' consists of thousands upon thousands of pages of this trope. "Marcel" never explicitly acknowledges that he is unreliable, but constantly undermines his own recollections such that it's impossible to trust anything he says 100%. Of course, the entire series is an exploration of the nature and limits of memory, so yeah.
* ''Literature/SacredMonster'': Jack isn't a first-person narrator, but while describing his life, he skips over certain compromising events and imagines what happened in "scenes" he wasn't present for.
* The short story "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story" by Russell Banks is built on this trope. The narrator Ron repeatedly insists that he was [[HerCodenameWasMarySue an extremely handsome, modest, and nice guy]] and that Sarah Cole was an extremely ugly woman he dated out of pity/niceness, but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that Ron is not ''nearly'' as nice a guy he tries to pass himself off as and that he constantly refers to himself in the third person because he's secretly ashamed of how poorly he treated Sarah. He even seems to realize it at the end when his narration breaks down and he suddenly begins describing Sarah as a gorgeous goddess who he stupidly and cruelly hurt, implying that not only does he know deep down that ''he'' didn't deserve ''her'' instead of the other way around but also that he might have described her as much worse-looking than she actually was to justify his treatment of her.
* Robert Irwin's brilliant ''Satan Wants Me'' is built around this trope. The narrator, Peter, is a young sociology student who likes sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll, studies children's behavior in a school playground, and is attempting to be accepted into a magical lodge. Part of the requirements made of him in Black Book Lodge is to keep a diary for magical purposes, writing down everything that happened during the day. ''Satan Wants Me'' is, essentially, this diary -- until in the middle of the book we find out that [[spoiler:this young sociologist's real object of study are the occultists themselves, and after his cover is blown he keeps on writing the diary just because and because his hand makes him write sometimes.]]
* Theodor Storm's novella ''Der Schimmelreiter'' (the rider on a white horse) puts the main story into question by the expedient of a triple framing story: 1. Storm begins by saying he is writing down from memory a story that he read in a magazine when he was young (but his memory already is so bad that he isn't sure in which magazine). 2. The narrator in the magazine tells of how he came to an in on the North Sea coast where he heard of the ghostly Schimmelreiter, and when he enquires further, 3. the local schoolmaster tells him the story of Hauke Haien, a young man who invented a more modern type of dyke who died in a storm flood and who according to popular belief became a ghost haunting that stretch of the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. The schoolmaster tells it rationally, as a psychological drama, with no supernatural elements, but he also says that his (superstitious) housekeeper would tell the story very differently.
* Timothy Kensington from the book ''SCIENCE!'' (a.k.a. "True Science") skews every event to try to fit his point of view, which is that Stratton's theories about altering reality are pure craziness. He remembers everyone wrong in order to convince everyone that his friend's theories about remembering everything wrong are insane. Yet, here he is, narrating this book, expecting you all to believe him unquestioningly.
* Creator/CSLewis' ''Literature/TheScrewtapeLetters''. The book is an EpistolaryNovel made up of letters written by a ''demon'', so of course he's more than willing to twist the truth to his own ends.
* Russell H. Greenan's ''The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton'' is told by a man who got a brain concussion during WWII and earnestly believes that objects can have souls. Considering that his best friend is a china pitcher named Eulalia, large portions of his narrative can be regarded as doubtful at best.
* ''Literature/ASeriesOfUnfortunateEvents'': In one of her letters, Beatrice claims that the stories the Baudelaires told her of their troubles in some cases differ wildly from Lemony's accounts. Lemony himself admits that some parts of the story he basically made up, due to lack of witnesses and trace evidence, but there are a few moments when he appears to be deceiving the reader or else not being quite truthful. For instance, he claims on separate occasions that the sugar bowl and the Snicket fires both contain evidence that will clear his name, when testimony from other characters suggests that there is nothing of the kind. Then there's the timeline. During ''The Slippery Slope'' Lemony writes a letter in the novel to his sister (Kit) asking for her to meet him at the Hotel Denouement. Presumably, this is the same day where the Baudelaires are supposed to arrive there, detailed in ''The Penultimate Peril'', and a character strongly suggested to be Lemony does indeed make an appearance. The problem is that said date occurs ''less than a week'' from the events in ''The Slippery Slope.'' Not only does that indicate that Lemony is less than a week behind the Baudelaires in tracking them -- directly contradicted by previous statements that suggest at least some years have gone by -- but that he also expects his book to be published and read by Kit in a week. But he certainly can't be asking Kit to meet him after the events of ''The Penultimate Peril'' because the Baudelaires burn down the hotel in that book's climax. Very, very odd.
* ''Literature/TheShadowhunterCodex'' is an in-universe guide book for new Shadowhunters written by the Clave, so it is pretty biased in favor of the Clave and Shadowhunters in general. For example the book states that Praetor Lupus was founded as a form of self policing by werewolves to protect others from the dangers new werewolves pose, while in reality they were founded to prevent the Clave from killing new werewolves.
* ''A Simple Favor'' is told in the first person from the perspective of three very different narrators, and none of them are completely reliable. This is due to the fact that Stephanie, the first narrator, is [[NaiveEverygirl a not-too-intelligent idealist]], and Emily, the second main narrator, is a [[ManipulativeBastard manipulative,]] [[TheSociopath sociopathic]] {{consummate liar}}. Almost all of Stephanie's interpretations of Emily's motives and actions are inaccurate, and the reader is kept in the dark about this for quite a few chapters.
* Phil's first-person narration in ''Literature/{{Snyper}}'' isn't technically unreliable but is full of subjective filtering and misinterpretation of the facts he's presenting, such as assuming Ashley is just a DumbBlonde secretary even though other characters frequently say otherwise.
* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'':
** This is one of the key reasons behind having multiple POV characters, not just to show the story from the perspectives of different "cameras" in different places, but to actually show *different Points of View*, and how two different characters can see the same event occur with completely different perspectives on what's happening due to their biases. Many distinct [=POVs=] are subtly unreliable, while others (Cersei, Victarion, the various Prologue characters), are not so much with the subtlety.
** Most of the POV characters are reliable, if biased, narrators, but there's one interesting instance of true unreliability: Sansa's frequent "recollections" of Sandor Clegane kissing her during the Battle of the Blackwater. Which would be understandable, if in fact he ''had''. During the actual scene, "for a moment she thought he meant to kiss her," but he does not; by the next book she's making occasional references to the kiss occurring, and by the fourth, she can recall how the kiss ''felt''. WordOfGod confirms that it's all in her head. Sansa's misremembering what happened with Sandor is an indication that she's been so emotionally traumatized by the abuse heaped on her that she clings to the memory of someone who she saw as a protector in King's Landing, even though the kiss never happened and in fact he almost raped her.
** Arya can also be unreliable sometimes in that, being a little girl, she can misread the behavior of adults or fail to grasp the real significance of what she sees.
** It's also worth comparing different [=POVs=] of the same character: compare Catelyn's chapter with Jaime in ''A Clash of Kings'', where he comes off as an obnoxious, egotistical {{jerkass}}, and Jaime's own first chapter in ''A Storm of Swords'' where he becomes bitter, biting, and well-aware of his own limits. Jon Snow has a similar disconnect; in his own chapters he reads like TheFettered, but from Samwell's POV he's an exhausted AntiHero. And then there's Stannis (whose head we've not got in as of yet), who from Catelyn's POV is a dour jerk, from Davos' POV is a WellIntentionedExtremist, and from Jon's POV is ToBeLawfulOrGood. When we see Littlefinger from Catelyn's perspective, we feel bad for him, in Ned's, he seems like a SmugSnake, and Tyrion consideres him a formidable foe, but it's not until Sansa meets him that it's clear how utterly ''[[{{Ephebophile}} slimy]]''. It should be interesting to see how other characters view Daenerys when they finally cross paths with her...
** In the first three books, we only see Daenerys through her own point of view, and she sees her exploits in Essos as those of a saviour who's liberating slaves. In the fifth book, we see her from the point of view of Barristan, who is still willing to follow her, but is starting to question some of her actions, and Quentyn, who perceives her ruling as the closest thing to hell on Earth he's ever seen. It will be interesting to see her from Tyrion's point of view when they finally meet...
** Tyrion tends to have this in perspectives of himself. He tends to view himself as a pragmatic idealist, trying to be the "good" member of his family while not being restricted by being foolishly honorable so he can get the job done. However, he commits a lot of morally questionable acts that he doesn't seem to appreciate, including sending an envoy to Catelyn Stark that included assassins and promising one of her daughters he didn't have, marrying the other Stark daughter against her will to appease his family, contracting the murder of people that annoy him, and outright murdering people who have outraged him with his own hands. Unfortunately, his higher view of himself in the books is portrayed as the actual reality on the television show.
** Backstory is sometimes given in bits and pieces from various characters, each with their own interpretation of history. For example, Meera Reed's telling of the tourney at Harrenhal (as she was told by her father) is dreamy and whimsical, while Barristan's memories of the same event are melancholic and bitter.
** This extends to the supplementary material as well. ''Literature/ArchmaesterGyldaynsHistories'' and ''Literature/TheWorldOfIceAndFire'' are in-universe accounts written by characters who, for the most part, didn't witness the events they're writing about firsthand. Archmaester Gyldayn frequently notes that history often gets lost or distorted over the years, though he himself shows some slight biases. In the latter Maester Yandel explicitly admits he's doing this; in particular he skips over Robert's rebellion entirely since no matter what he says ''somebody'' powerful will be offended.
* ''Literature/TheSouthernReachTrilogy'': In ''Annihilation'', the biologist turns out to be not entirely reliable as she withholds some information from her journal at first, like how far the brightness has already progressed within her. She claims that she does so to not seem like a compromised source, but acknowledges that this is exactly what it makes her look like.
* ''Film/{{Spider}}'' by Patrick [=McGrath=], is narrated by the main character, who is insane. At the end of the book it turns out practically everything he recollected to the reader was heavily warped by his perception. [=McGrath=] specializes in this trope. ''Asylum'' is another excellent example.
* The ''VideoGame/StarCraft'' novel ''I, Mengsk'' contains two sections: one narrated by [[MagnificentBastard Arcturus Mengsk]], manipulator extraordinaire, and one narrated by his son Valerian. In Arcturus's segments, he is a perfect student, blows past his peers in every way, charms any girl he wants, is a perfect soldier, etc. etc. etc. Other people are either smitten with him (like his girlfriend Juliana) or fools (like his father Angus). In Valerian's segments, he paints a very different, much darker picture of Arcturus that's more in keeping with his video game appearances and other novels such as ''Liberty's Crusade''. It demonstrates how, although most people ''are'' swept up by his father's rhetoric and believe the elder Mengsk is who he claims to be, Valerian [[BrokenPedestal has grown beyond that]] and sees the monster his father really is for himself.
* ''Literature/StarshipTroopers'': There are places where Rico is likely describing something that happened to him in the third-person. The biggest one involves [[spoiler:the death of the Lieutenant in his beloved Rascak's Roughnecks MI unit, where he describes the Lieutenant saving two privates before being killed. It's hinted that one of them was probably Rico.]]
* ''Franchise/StarWarsExpandedUniverse'': ''Literature/TheLegendsOfLukeSkywalker'' is about several people swapping stories about Luke, all of which are inaccurate to some degree in-universe.
* ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'':
** ''[[Literature/JediAcademyTrilogy I, Jedi]]'' is made of this trope. Basically, [[MarySue Corran]] has an internal dialogue along the lines of "She so wants me, '''[[ChasteHero I must remain faithful to Mirax!]]'''" [[AuthorAppeal with every female character]].
** Drew Karpyshyn, author of the ''Literature/DarthBane'' books [[WordOfGod discussed this]] in relation to a fan theory regarding the ending. He had actually intended for the ending to be clear, but to many it wasn't. He noted that in order for the fan theory to work, readers would have to assume that he was being an unreliable narrator at the end of the book, something that he had never done before. "[[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DtRcbmCVBwIJ:www.drewkarpyshyn.com/spoiler.htm Unfortunately, “twist” endings have become so prevalent recently that I think people assume narrators are unreliable now by default...]]"
* The children's book ''Literature/TheStinkyCheeseMan and Other Fairly Stupid Tales'' combines an unreliable narrator with NoFourthWall: First, Jack the Narrator spoils the ending of "Little Red Running Shorts", prompting the characters from that story to quit in disgust. Then, Jack's narration of his own story, "Jack's Bean Problem" is immediately interrupted by the premature arrival of the Giant. When the Giant threatens to eat Jack if he can't tell a better story, Jack launches into a recursive story in which the Giant threatens to eat him if he can't tell a better story, so Jack launches into a recursive story in which the Giant threatens to eat him if he can't tell a better story. The giant also says that even if Jack tells a better story, he'll still eat him anyway (ho, ho, ho), leading to the looping story.
* Hagar Shipley (formerly Currie) from Margaret Laurence's ''Literature/TheStoneAngel'' fits the bill in that she is a very proud, cynical woman. It can be very difficult to discern whether she is exaggerating about somebody or if the negative attributes she applies to someone is all in her head.
** Lottie is a girl Hagar grows up with, and often Hagar will dismiss her as a nobody. She also assumes that when Lottie makes a comment about her, it is meant in a derogatory manner.
** Hagar describes her husband as a low-class slob who is lazy and not worth her respect; insight into Bram's character, however, can reveal that Hagar drove him to drink.
* ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'' has Shallan Davar, who has a particularly DarkAndTroubledPast and has heavily rewritten her own memories to gloss over the things she doesn't want to think about. A large chunk of her plot arc involves her peeling away the layers of false memory and mental misdirection, gradually pulling up the various secrets she's been keeping from herself.
%%* Oswald Bastable, or at least Creator/ENesbit's version of him in ''Literature/TheStoryOfTheTreasureSeekers''.
* Done in ''Literature/TalesOfMU'':
** Where the narrator Mackenzie isn't lying to the audience -- just frequently clueless or in deep denial. It's written so that the audience almost always knows what's going on even if she doesn't, which is sometimes subtle (the slow build-up to the revelation about [[UnsettlingGenderReveal Steff]]) and other times obvious (her overwrought crush on the AlphaBitch, Sooni).
** Additionally, the [=MUniverse's=] history is also handled this way; so far, we've heard multiple accounts of the creation of the world, all of which contradict each other. But the kicker is that the gods exist, and semi-regularly involve themselves in worldly affairs, meaning that the gods themselves are {{Unreliable Narrator}}s.
* In ''Literature/TallTaleAmerica'' the author claims that the entire book is a true story and goes into detail about all the trustworthy sources he consulted in putting it together. Then he says, "And on top of all this, I've made improvements of my own all along the way -- [[InsaneTrollLogic fixed up fact after fact to make it truer than it ever was before.]]"
* Justified and exploited InUniverse in ''Literature/TerraIgnota''. Book three, ''The Will to Battle'', reveals that Mycroft's chronicle as presented in the first two books has been redacted to remove any signs of his growing madness, though the person responsible for that admits to have refrained from doing so in the third book due to said madness having become too intertwined with the text itself; which explains how Mycroft can see people who have been dead for over a decade and have [[BreakingTheFourthWall side conversations with his presumed future reader]] and [[HobbesWasRight argue with Thomas Hobbes]]. InUniverse, Mycroft's madness is actually used by the heads of the Hives as a crowd control method by releasing said chronicle to the public. It contains the whole, true story of the events leading up to the war, but since Mycroft is assumed to be insane by most people it means everyone is entitled to pick and choose which parts of the chronicle they believe and which parts they dismiss as fabrication.
* The ''Literature/ThievesWorld'' SharedUniverse used this as a way of dealing with [[ContinuitySnarl continuity errors]] between the many authors who wrote for it. A preface framing story has an old man explaining to a new arrival to the city of [[WretchedHive Sanctuary]] that one should not believe everything in the stories one hears, as everyone spins the stories to fit their agendas, to make themselves sound more important in a good story, or less to blame in a bad one, and two people telling the same story may have wildly different variations.
* At one point in ''Literature/TheThingsTheyCarried'', the narrator retells a story told to him by the squad's medic, Rat Kiley, prefacing it with the admission that though Kiley's stories always have a basis in truth, they are often greatly exaggerated, stating that "If Rat told you he slept with two women on a particular night, you can be safe in assuming one and a half." At another point, the narrator goes on a long rant about how a war stories' veracity has no relation to whether or not it actually occurred, and goes on to tell a "true" war story that he made up on the spot. He then states that the mark of a "true" war story is that the reader does not care if it is true.
** On another occasion, he recounts a story about another of the soldiers in his unit, which he later admits was actually him.
* Both in and out of universe in ''Literature/TheThirteenthTale''. Vida has a reputation for lying to people about her life story, so much so that Margaret refuses to work on this project without independently verifiable sources. Also, certain details of Vida's story raise questions for the reader.
* ''Literature/ThisBookIsFullOfSpidersSeriouslyDudeDontTouchIt'' ends with Lance Falconer providing Dave with some extra material for the book Amy is writing in exchange for a cut of the profits, on condition that the book's account of Lance is a cool, handsome, badass {{action hero}} who owns a Porsche.
* In Creator/CSLewis's ''Literature/TillWeHaveFaces'', at the start of the second part Orual reveals that the first half of the book was not an accurate version of what happened, but she does not have the time to revise the whole book, so she merely continues forward, explaining how she learned she was wrong.
* The Time Traveller in ''Literature/TheTimeMachine'' by Creator/HGWells forms various hypotheses about the nature of the Eloi as the story progresses. Also, due to the novel's FramingDevice, the narrator's spellings of the few samples of Eloi language that readers get are likely poor reflections of the actual phonology, as neither the Time Traveller nor the outer story's narrator is a linguist by profession.
* [[InvokedTrope Invoked]] in [[Creator/JorgeLuisBorges Borges']] "Literature/TlonUqbarOrbisTertius":
-->"We [[[SelfInsertFic Borges and a fellow writer]]] became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers -- very few readers -- to perceive an atrocious or banal reality."
* In-universe in ''Literature/ATreeGrowsInBrooklyn''. One chapter quotes a diary kept briefly by the main character. Her diary entries make frequent references to her father’s illness -- puzzling to the reader, since the father’s health has never been an issue. Near the end of the chapter, she records that her mother found the diary and made her change all occurrences of “drunk” to “sick”.
* ''The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs'' is a PerspectiveFlip on ''Literature/TheThreeLittlePigs''. The Wolf details how every instance was a mistake or misunderstanding. Still, the pictures with the text -- and the Wolf's shifty tone -- can lead even a small child to doubt the veracity of his claims that he is the victim. Specifically, there's the fact that he just "had" to eat the pigs when unfortunate (and completely not his fault) events killed them because "why waste them?" Granted, the Wolf is telling his side of the story. It is possible that the more traditional story was the lie.
* Creator/HenryJames's novella ''Literature/TheTurnOfTheScrew'': Are the ghosts real or simply the narrator's imagination?
* ''Literature/{{Twig}}'' is narrated by Sy, an 11-year-old ManipulativeBastard who sees the world in terms of manipulators and their dupes, and all of his narration is colored by this impression-for example, it's likely that not ''every'' person he talks to has precisely calculated their words, posture, and phrasing to elicit a desired result. It gets worse when [[spoiler:he starts having vivid hallucinations, and we're never sure if what we're seeing is real, or just in Sy's head]].
* Scott Alexander's ''Literature/{{Unsong}}'' is narrated by Aaron-Smith Teller, a Kabbalist who interprets every event as some sort of elaborate metaphor and insists that "nothing is ever a coincidence". Towards the end, [[spoiler:Ana receives a revelation from God confirming that Aaron is wrong; coincidences do in fact exist and are actually quite common.]]
* In Sharon Creech's ''The Wanderer Sophie'', a 13-years-old girl, is sailing in a small boat across the Atlantic, with her two cousins (both also 13) and three uncles. The story is given to us as her and Cody's (one of the cousins) diaries. At first Sophie's diary seems consistent and convincing. However, when comparing it with Cody's diary, we quickly notice that Sophie blacks out any notions that [[spoiler:she is actually adopted. Even when somebody in her vicinity uses the word "orphan", she changes it to something else, or else outright skips it in the diary]]. Also, when telling Bompie's stories, she (potentially inadvertantly) adds details about [[spoiler:him struggling in the water, like she did in the accident that killed her birth parents]].
* H. G. Wells' ''Literature/WarOfTheWorlds'' makes more sense if we doubt the narrator's reliability. A progressive-minded Victorian, he is dazzled by the Martians' technology, and sees them as embodying the naïve popular view that humans were "evolving" towards beings of pure brain without "animal" functions like eating. He constantly describes them as coldly brilliant superminds, whereas their actual behaviour -- their rampaging vandalism, their unpreparedness for Earth's seas, and, of course, their fatal ignorance of Biology 101 -- suggests a bunch of dumb adventurers with guns running wild among helpless primitives. Given that Wells's known intention was to show the British how it would feel to be the savages they were busy conquering, this misguided admiration may be exactly the effect he intended.
* WordOfGod says that in the ''Literature/WarriorCats'' novel ''The Last Hope'', [[spoiler:Dovewing hallucinated Firestar walking away from Tigerstar, and that he actually died from wounds received fight with him.]] Then again, WordOfGod from another of the authors states that [[spoiler:Firestar died from the smoke of a nearby tree that was struck by lightning]], so this may actually be a case of unreliable God.
* ''Literature/WeNeedToTalkAboutKevin'' leaves open the possibility that Eva, the title character's mother and narrator, may have been exaggerating her son's malignancy to absolve her of any responsibility. Several times she assumes he's responsible for an incident with no evidence to support this, and on at least one of these occasions she's actually proved wrong. The end of the story further adds to the unreliability, in that [[spoiler:the entire FramingDevice was a lie -- the book is written as a series of letters from Eva to her husband Franklin, who was actually one of the victims of Kevin's rampage but who most readers will assume is still alive because of the story's presentation]].
* Zoe Heller's ''What Was She Thinking?'' (filmed as ''Film/NotesOnAScandal''): Barbara purports to be a cool, unbiased narrator of her friend Sheba's disastrous affair with a 15-year-old boy. In fact, [[spoiler:she's a PsychoLesbian StalkerWithACrush who's blatantly using the upheaval in Sheba's life to isolate and control her.]]
* ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'' books are told through a subjective third person perspective, and any given scene is usually colored to some extent by who the [=PoV=] character at the time is. Character-specific traits and biases creep into the narrative, and some characters are less reliable than others in how they interpret events that occur around them. Nynaeve and Mat are among the biggest offenders, and the stream-of-thought narration from their point-of-view chapters will actively lie to the reader about their motivations and feelings.
* ''Literature/WinnieThePooh'' sometimes slips into this when the naive characters have a misconception and the narrator doesn't correct them. For instance, when Christopher Robin mentions learning about factors, Pooh thinks Factors is a person, and the narration keeps talking as though he/she/they/it really ''is'' a person.
* ''Literature/TheWitchlands'': Book 2, ''Windwitch'', reveals that some of this has been going on in the sections of ''Truthwitch'' from Merik's POV, as he considers Vivia to be an [[DaddysLittleVillain Evil Princess]] and his reactions to her actions and descriptions of her are coloured by this. Vivia gets her POV sections in book two, and it paints a very different picture.
* Thomas Cromwell of ''Literature/WolfHall'', while not precisely the narrator, has only a very selective section of thoughts revealed during the book, and tends to skip over thinking about many of his more morally dubious actions. At the end of the sequel, ''Bring Up the Bodies'', it is implied by another character that he chose the five men charged with adultery with Anne Boleyn because they took part in a masque insulting his former master Wolsey. This is probably true but he never thinks about this (or indeed any other reasons) while he is selecting the men.
* Creator/JamesTiptreeJr's "[[http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/tiptree2/tiptree21.html The Women Men Don't See]]" is narrated by a super-manly shadowy ex-spy MightyWhitey who thinks he knows what kind of story he's in -- after the plane crashes, he's going to assume leadership and save the female passengers in the plane crash with the help of the obedient Maya pilot. He's utterly, utterly wrong, and you have to read around the edges of his ego and his narration to figure out what's ''actually'' going on.
* ''Literature/{{Worm}}'':
** In Chapter 10 and occasionally thereafter, Taylor does not realize Imp is present due to Imp's PerceptionFilter powers. This also causes her to misrepresent certain aspects of Imp's powers, because... well, she can't perceive them.
** In Chapter 14, Taylor is affected by [[spoiler:an agnosia plague]], which causes her to inadvertently misrepresent several important details. The people she believed to be [[spoiler:Grue and Tattletale]] are actually [[spoiler:Jack Slash and Bonesaw]].
** In Chapter 30, after [[spoiler:Taylor becomes Khepri and begins to lose her memories]], the narration noticeably shifts to account for that lack of information.
** More generally, the entire story is first-person and filtered through Taylor's fairly major hang-ups and biases. The third-person interludes show different characters ruminating on some of the same events with very different contexts and interpretations.
* In ''Literature/WutheringHeights'', there are two main narrators. Mr Lockwood who is telling us the story, and Ellen Dean who is telling him about Heathcliff. Lockwood is shown very early on to be unreliable as he describes Heathcliff as a "capital fellow", only to later learn that that is really not the case. Ellen 'Nelly' Dean herself is full of biased opinions, and is very judgmental of most of the other characters. She is also unreliable as a character, as she happily spills the personal details and secrets of all the people who have confided in her to a complete stranger with little hesitation.
** An alternative interpretation is that there is only the one narrator, Mr Lockwood, but unreliability is piled on unreliability. We know ''he'' is unreliable in his own first-hand account, so there has to be some doubt about his reporting of what Nelly Dean told him. And what of his reporting of what other characters told ''her''? It can seem like a game of chinese whispers.
* A short story, "Literature/TheYellowWallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, features a narrator who is unreliable on all levels. Is she driven to insanity? Is she already insane from the beginning? Is the house actually haunted? Is she actually dead? If she isn't insane upon her arrival, at what point in the story does she turn insane? Are the peripheral characters of the story real, figments of her imagination entirely, ghosts, or real but turned into different characters via her delusion? Are any of her observations trustworthy, such as the description of her room and reasons why there are ''bars on the windows'' and ''hooks and rings'' in the walls? There is evidence to support any of the possible theories, and, since the narrator actually ''is'' insane by the end of the story, absolutely none of the questions are answered.
* This is part of the unique quality of the non-fiction book "Literature/YouCouldDoSomethingAmazingWithYourLife" (subtitled "You Are Raoul Moat"), which explores the state of mind of the British spree killer [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Northumbria_Police_manhunt Raoul Moat]] both before and after he goes on his rampage. The whole point of the book is that it documents what Moat himself is thinking and feeling, in the second person, and his reasonings for doing what he did -- however the book makes it ''abundantly'' clear that his perception of events and his own actions (and therefore, in context, ''your'' perception of events) are often vastly at odds with reality (particularly where it comes to his violent behaviour and his ex partner's fidelity), often bluntly suffixing Moat's/your thoughts with a direct contradiction of what he/you is saying and thinking.
* Creator/RobertBloch's classic short story "Yours Truly, UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper" is a great example. Set in the modern day, the first-person narrator relates an incident in which a friend of his becomes convinced that Jack the Ripper killed all those women as part of an occult ceremony to attain immortality. He assists his friend in his investigations and helps him track suspects [[spoiler:but the big twist is that the narrator himself is Jack the Ripper, and while his friend's theory was correct, he had the wrong suspect. This is revealed in the final line of the story when the narrator, holding a knife, says, "Just call me... ''Jack.''"]] Bloch never cheats -- you can re-read the story knowing the ending, and it remains internally consistent, although it changes from an odd little comedy to a chilling thriller.
* Robert Pirsig's novel ''Literature/ZenAndTheArtOfMotorcycleMaintenance'' deals, partly, with the unnamed narrator's attempt to stave off the re-emergence of his former "insane" personality, nicknamed "Phaedrus", and thereby protect his young son from sinking into madness himself. However, in the end, he realizes that "Phaedrus" is in fact the saner and more authentic personality, whereas his "normal" self is a facade which has in fact ''caused'' his son's mental problems. When he embraces and integrates his Phaedrus-self, father and son are healed and reconciled.

!!Light Novels:
* ''LightNovel/AnotherNote'' is narrated by Mello. He is biased in favor of L, having been raised to be his successor, and states openly that he sympathizes in some ways with B, because both he and B are AlwaysSecondBest. Also, Mello is telling a story that he heard from L, who heard the details from Naomi, so Mello is filling in a lot of blanks he couldn't possibly know. (He lampshades this too, giving a ShoutOut to the above-mentioned [[Literature/TheCatcherInTheRye Holden Caulfield]], calling him "The greatest literary bullshitter of all time.")
* ''LightNovel/ACertainMagicalIndex'':
** One recurring element in Touma's POV is that he considers himself to be a normal person and not some legendary hero. The narration also tends to refer to him as such. Except that he possesses [[AntiMagic a one-of-a-kind power]], repeatedly puts himself at risk to save anything from one person's life to the entire world, and [[DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu literally punches out all kinds of powerful opponents in the process]].
** Accelerator, on the other hand, thinks of himself as a irredeemable villain for his actions. Even after he has his HeelFaceTurn and softens a lot, he maintains this mindset. Notably, he goes out of his way to prevent collateral damage in a fight but considers this merely enough to make him a "first-class villain", causing his opponent to wonder what Accelerator would consider an actual hero.
** Then there's Shiage, who lacks any kind of supernatural power unlike the previous two. He therefore has a normal human's perspective on events, but this still isn't the same as being accurate. He considers Accelerator to be at the absolute apex due to being the strongest esper (there are many entities in the setting that would ''easily'' beat Accelerator) and has barely any idea that magic exists.
* In ''Literature/DanganronpaZero'' it's deliberately used during the chapters where Ryoko Otonashi is the narrator, as [[AmnesiacHero she has both retrograde and anterograde amnesia]], making her constanly forget things she should already know and people she has already met. However, the chapters written from other characters' perspectives aren't that reliable either, with narration hiding certain facts or even lying to the reader.
* Kyon from the ''Literature/HaruhiSuzumiya'' series is a possible example here. Despite the title, he's the main character. He's also the narrator, and it seems at times he confuses the two. Dialogue made by himself as the narrator will be responded to by other characters as if he, as the character, said it; while he the Narrator will point out details that he, as the character, is either [[SelectiveObliviousness ignoring or supposedly isn't aware of.]] It's to little wonder that this has made a few people paranoid about him.
** Also, Kyon usually [[ObfuscatingStupidity knows much more than he admits]], even to the reader. His habit of stating to [[MrExposition wordy characters]] "I don't understand you," contrasts with his tendency to go off on downright cerebral tangents in a way which is...frustrating. Ignoring completely that his understanding of whateve is being discussed is often immediately made clear by the narration.
** There have been passages where Kyon has begun to iterate a thought, then cut himself off and invoked SelectiveObliviousness because no no, it's best to not even think that. Who knows how many ideas character-Kyon refuses to consider and how many facts narrator-Kyon deliberately twists? The great mysteries of the series are divided between things Kyon presumably doesn't know at the time the story is set, and things Kyon has ''neglected to mention'' including [[NoNameGiven any part of his real name]]. After eleven novels, it looks like it's either plot or capriciousness. There's also undeniable color to depictions of Kyon and those around him.
* Nokko in ''Literature/MagicalGirlRaisingProject Restart'' is one of the main POV characters, yet she somehow manages to avoid mentioning that [[spoiler:she's the Evil King who is supposed to kill everyone else in the game until it's revealed.]]

----

* And from ''Literature/TheBible'' we have the Amalekite who appears at the beginning of 2nd Samuel to give King David the personal effects of King Saul after he fell dead in battle against the Philistines. At the end of 1st Samuel, Saul is badly wounded and tells his armor-bearer to slay him so that his enemies wouldn't make sport of him, but since his armor-bearer refused to do that, Saul falls upon his own sword and dies, and so also does his armor-bearer. The Amalekite, who comes along RobbingTheDead, tells a different story -- that he found King Saul still alive but badly wounded, and Saul asks for the Amalekite to kill him, which he claims that he does. The Amalekite tells this story in the hope of expecting a reward for the cool loot he had taken off the fallen king. However, the only reward the Amalekite gets is to be killed by King David himself, since according to David the Amalekite testified with his own mouth that he had killed "the Lord's anointed".

* In ''LightNovel/DanganronpaZero'' it's deliberately used during the chapters where Ryoko Otonashi is the narrator, as [[AmnesiacHero she has both retrograde and anterograde amnesia]], making her constanly forget things she should already know and people she has already met. However, the chapters written from other characters' perspectives aren't that reliable either, with narration hiding certain facts or even lying to the reader.

* Jennifer A. Nielsen's ''Literature/AscendanceTrilogy'' (especially ''The False Prince'', the first novel) provides an example in which the narrator rarely actually lies, either to the readers or the other characters he interacts with, and on the occasions he does tell an outright lie often points it out in the narration. Instead, his unreliability comes from his tendency to tell only part of the truth so that it is easily misinterpreted or to tell the truth in a manner that makes other characters believe he is lying or being sarcastic. In the later two books he is more forward about things, but still will often let the reader believe what the general public believes about a situation until it comes time to reveal the more complete version of the truth.

* Kyon from the ''LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya'' series is a possible example here. Despite the title, he's the main character. He's also the narrator, and it seems at times he confuses the two. Dialogue made by himself the Narrator will be responded to by other characters as if he the Character said it; while he the Narrator will point out details that he the Character is either [[SelectiveObliviousness ignoring or supposedly isn't aware of.]] It's to little wonder that this has made a few people paranoid about him.

* Nokko in ''LightNovel/MagicalGirlRaisingProject Restart'' is one of the main POV characters, yet she somehow manages to avoid mentioning that [[spoiler:she's the Evil King who is supposed to kill everyone else in the game until it's revealed.]]

* Lemuel Gulliver from ''Literature/GulliversTravels'' becomes one by the fourth journey. He describes [[StrawVulcan the Houyhnhnms]] as the perfect civilization, despite their arrogance, elitism, and genocidal tendencies.

* Creator/RobertBloch's classic short story "Yours Truly, UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper" is a great example. Set in the modern day, the first-person narrator relates an incident in which a friend of his becomes convinced that Jack the Ripper killed all those women as part of an occult ceremony to attain immortality. He assists his friend in his investigations and helps him track suspects [[spoiler:but the big twist is that the narrator himself is Jack the Ripper, and while his friend's theory was correct, he had the wrong suspect. This is revealed in the final line of the story when the narrator, holding a knife, says, "Just call me... Jack!"]] Bloch never cheats -- you can re-read the story knowing the ending, and it remains internally consistent, although it changes from an odd little comedy to a chilling thriller.

* Creator/RobertBloch's classic short story "Yours Truly UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper" is a great example. Set in the modern day, the first-person narrator relates an incident in which a friend of his becomes convinced that Jack the Ripper killed all those women as part of an occult ceremony to attain immortality. He assists his friend in his investigations and helps him track suspects [[spoiler:but the big twist is that the narrator himself is Jack the Ripper, and while his friend's theory was correct, he had the wrong suspect. This is revealed in the final line of the story when the narrator, holding a knife, says, "Just call me... Jack!"]] Bloch never cheats -- you can re-read the story knowing the ending, and it remains internally consistent, although it changes from an odd little comedy to a chilling thriller.

* James Tiptree, Jr.'s "[[http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/tiptree2/tiptree21.html The Women Men Don't See]]" is narrated by a super-manly shadowy ex-spy MightyWhitey who thinks he knows what kind of story he's in -- after the plane crashes, he's going to assume leadership and save the female passengers in the plane crash with the help of the obedient Maya pilot. He's utterly, utterly wrong, and you have to read around the edges of his ego and his narration to figure out what's ''actually'' going on.

* James Tiptree, Jr.'s "[[http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/tiptree2/tiptree21.html The Women Men Don't See]]" is narrated by a super-manly shadowy ex-spy MightyWhitey who thinks he knows what kind of story he's in -- after the plane crashes, he's going to assume leadership and save the female passengers in the plane crash with the help of the obedient Maya pilot. He's utterly, utterly wrong, and you have to read around the edges of his ego and his narration to figure out what's ''actually'' going on. (A good critical essay describing the technique is [[http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/review-the-women-men-dont-see-by-james-tiptree-jr/ over here.]])

** ''Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks'' features the unreliable duo of Jack Parlabane and Michael Loftus, both of whom conceal the fact that they are [[spoiler: not in fact dead]]. A third-person narrator also gets in on the act by misleading the reader as to the true identity of [[spoiler: the person who sabotaged Michael's flat]].

** ''Literature/AndThenThereWereNone'': at one point, the actual murderer, [[spoiler:Judge Wargrave]], is described as being surprised when the person who wrote the letter inviting them to Indian Island isn't at the island to greet them -- and the narrator's little peek into the character's thoughts reveals (or seems to reveal) that the character's surprise is ''genuine''. (Since this books uses a third-person omniscient narration, this might be a case of LyingCreator, but no one knows if it was deliberate or accidental on Christie's part.)
** ''Literature/EndlessNight'' -- Michael talks about meeting the love of his life, a rich heiress, marrying her, fighting with her best friend, building their dream house, only for her to die mysteriously... [[spoiler: and then you find out that all of that was a lie, because ''he's'' the murderer and his true love is the best friend, who he's known since before the story.]]

*** Severian is perhaps the least reliable narrator ever; unreliable because (by his own claim) he is unsure whether he was merely a man doing a necessary job well or a violent sadist, whether he was a rapist or a genuine lover [[spoiler: (he should know this by the end, because he has a copy of her personality, memories and thoughts in his head for most of the book)]] and/or whether he was, basically, the second coming of Jesus or not. [[spoiler: The unintentional time-travel incest and meeting between three and five other versions of himself can't help.]]

** "Seven American Nights" may be the height of this trope in Wolfe's oeuvre. First, the author of the travelogue that makes up the story states at one point that he altered the text for fear of it being read by the American secret police. Second, the author placed some hallucinogen into a candy egg, then mixed up the eggs so he wouldn't know which one was the real one. Then he ate a single egg every night. That means that at least one of his nights of experiences could have been a hallucination. And one of the eggs got stolen, so it was ''also'' possible the none of the nights were a hallucination. Finally, at the end of the story, [[spoiler: the author of the travelogue's mother, who had been the one reading it (along with his fiancee), calls into question the veracity of the handwriting. So it's possible the entire thing is a forgery, or at the very least important parts.]]

* ''Literature/BadMonkeys'' has one that challenges this. Hard. Jane Charlotte admits very early to be a homeless, drug-addicted murderer. But with only a few exceptions, the entire story is told by her and while challenged by the second party, it is quite difficult to tell which parts of the story happened and which didn't. The fact that Creator/MattRuff states on the books page that she ''loves'' to lie makes it hard, that she [[spoiler: might be heavily shizophrenic]] harder and that [[spoiler: everything might be true with the only issue that she bended the truth to fit her story]] impossible to tell. It is left up to the reader to guess how much -- if anything at all -- is true.

* Done very well in ''The Family of Pascual Duarte'', from Spanish author Camilo José Cela. Basically it tells the story of an unnamed editor(1) who finds and corrects the "memoirs" that he found in an old church, addressed to a bishop (2), who made a lot of censorship and correction on them beforehand, by Pascual Duarte (3), who admits that he mixed a lot of facts when writing them, along with the more stealthy: a) non linear narration of the events, b) subjectivization and constant digression to gain the favor of the reader and c) manipulation of the contents because of real life problems (lack of paper, tripped and mixed the pages, etc.). The purpose of the "memoirs"? [[spoiler: to gain clerical pardon, staving off his imminent execution]]. That's right, guys. An editor who edits an editor who edits the edited version of Pascual's life. It is subtly implied by the end of the book that the real life author in fact "edited" the story himself, making him another step in the long line of editors the book will have (publisher's editors, academic editors, "reader editor", etc.). This, by context, was a sort of TakeThat to Franquism, along with a few subtle political/social references/criticism (which make a big part of the novel objective).

* In ''Literature/GoneGirl'', Nick Dunne leaves out numerous details throughout the story, making the reader suspicious about ''how'' unreliable he is, and whether or not he is behind his wife Amy's disappearance. [[spoiler: It turns out that Amy is even more unreliable than her husband, as her diary was deliberately fabricated with lies so that she could frame her husband.]]

* ''The History of Love'': near the end, Leo explains how he's an unreliable narrator; it also turns out that Bruno was [[spoiler: DeadAllAlong ]], which casts the last scene with him in a different light.

* The protagonist Ted in ''Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream'' says that [[CureYourGays Benny]], [[TheEeyore Gorrister]], [[ThoseWackyNazis Nimdok]] and [[BlackAndNerdy Ellen]] all hate him because he's the youngest and because AM effects him the least. He also says Ellen claims to have had sex only twice before being brought down into AM, yet in the game she was both married and [[spoiler: a rape victim.]]

* In Sharon Creech's ''The Wanderer Sophie'', a 13-years-old girl, is sailing in a small boat across the Atlantic, with her two cousins (both also 13) and three uncles. The story is given to us as her and Cody's (one of the cousins) diaries. At first Sophie's diary seems consistent and convincing. However, when comparing it with Cody's diary, we quickly notice that Sophie blacks out any notions that [[spoiler: she is actually adopted. Even when somebody in her vicinity uses the word "orphan", she changes it to something else, or else outright skips it in the diary]]. Also, when telling Bompie's stories, she (potentially inadvertantly) adds details about [[spoiler:him struggling in the water, like she did in the accident that killed her birth parents]].

* WordOfGod says that in the ''Literature/WarriorCats'' novel ''The Last Hope'', [[spoiler: Dovewing hallucinated Firestar walking away from Tigerstar, and that he actually died from wounds received fight with him.]] Then again, WordOfGod from another of the authors states that [[spoiler: Firestar died from the smoke of a nearby tree that was struck by lightning]], so this may actually be a case of unreliable God.

** The series never alludes to Dumbledore's sexuality because Harry, being a somewhat obtuse teenage boy, never even thinks about the love life of his aged mentor. Even when one of the Headmaster's school friends makes a fairly overt crack about it, the comment goes right over Harry's head. An elderly relative of Ron’s says in the same conversation there were “always strange rumors” about him and it goes over Harry’s head as well.

* Creator/FyodorDostoyevsky:

* Reams of paper have been written on the narrative technique used in ''Literature/TheBrothersKaramazov'', which ostensibly makes the narrator out to be a resident of the town, even placing him physically at certain events. It's clear, however, that he knows more than an observer could possibly know, and there are disturbing stretches of the narrative in which the narrator is completely absent, dissolved into the perspective of the characters. This becomes a problem when one character starts [[TheDevil speaking with things that probably aren't there]], and the critical reader will start to wonder about other times this character supposedly heard things. The real kicker though? The points at which the narrator's reliability are questioned are ''[[MindScrew pivotal moments in the book]]'', moments that affect your understanding of everything that has happened up till then.
** Similarly in ''Literature/{{Demons}}'', though in that novel, the narrator is more explicitly party to its events. He has a name (Anton Lavrentievich [=G-----v=], and he is explicitly addressed by a few characters throughout the text), describes himself as a good friend of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhonvensky (one of the central characters), and acknowledges that he used the spectacular events that ensue as the basis for this, his "first novel." Nevertheless, lots of things are described for which he could not possibly have been present (which he [[HandWave handwaves]] as having been fictionalized from the characters' accounts, related to him later), and especially the unspoken thoughts and inner motivations of several characters strain the bounds of the WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief.

* Creator/MachadoDeAssis' ''Literature/DomCasmurro'' is an interesting case -- for a long time it was believed the protagonist and narrator Dr. Bento was just in his actions, being simply and clearly cheated on by his wife. However, only years after the author's death critics begun to associate the narrative with the protagonist's faulty memory (he commits continuity errors while telling his story, and lets it slip a few times as he complains about his memory), paranoia and profession (as a lawyer, he was fairly capable of distorting stories to bring a more sympathetic vision to his own actions). Those add up for a really unreliable narrator who struggles to remember simple facts, sees things that aren't really there and wants the reader's approval.
** In fact, the unreliable narrator is such a common trope in Assis' novels that the exception itself is worth mentioning: in ''The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas'' the narrator is more reliable than any other simply because he is dead. Thus he doesn't care about his life anymore and doesn't try to deceive the reader. Sometimes he stumbles at points where he had lied to himself, and even in death he keeps the rationale of life about his personal thoughts, like his rationalization as to why he didn't go through with his relationship with Eugenia (he convinced himself she had a lame leg -- when actually he didn't marry her because she was poor) and how he regretted paying a few silver coins to a black man who saved his life (because he didn't like parting with money, but he convinced himself it was because the man didn't want any reward).

** Similarly in ''Demons'', though in that novel, the narrator is more explicitly party to its events. He has a name (Anton Lavrentievich [=G-----v=], and he is explicitly addressed by a few characters throughout the text), describes himself as a good friend of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhonvensky (one of the central characters), and acknowledges that he used the spectacular events that ensue as the basis for this, his "first novel." Nevertheless, lots of things are described for which he could not possibly have been present (which he [[HandWave handwaves]] as having been fictionalized from the characters' accounts, related to him later), and especially the unspoken thoughts and inner motivations of several characters strain the bounds of the WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief.

* The Caitlín Kiernan novel ''Literature/{{The Red Tree|2009}}'' takes this trope UpToEleven with not just one but at least three and at some points five levels of unreliable narration. First, there is the main character Sarah: the story is told in the form of her journal, and she's clearly losing it (a note at the beginning mentions she killed herself after the events in the story). Then there is the unknown person who collected Sarah's journal and mailed it to her editor. Finally, there is the editor herself, who is distinctly coy in her note about any details that might confirm or deny Sarah's story. If that weren't enough, there are long sections of the book where Sarah is supposedly quoting from a manuscript she found. The author of this manuscript is also of questionable sanity, and there are several places where he is quoting from sources of questionable veracity. Not only is it impossible to tell if anything in this book actually happened outside anyone's imagination, it isn't even possible to tell whose imagination it might have been. It works, though.

* Agota Kristof's first ''Literature/TheBookOfLies'' trilogy (''The Notebook'', ''The Proof'', and ''The Third Lie'') rides this trope like a pogo stick on your spine. It is really an artform the way each of the twins can lie. Even in the first book where they set in conditions that would make it impossible for them to be untruthful about anything they write in the notebook, they still manage to dupe everyone around them -- and the reader -- more times than could ever be counted. By the end of the third book, it ultimately becomes impossible to tell what about what actually happened due to the web of lies that both Lucas and Claus managed to weave.

** Where the narrator Mackenzie isn't lying to the audience -- just frequently clueless or in deep denial. It's written so that the audience almost always knows what's going on even if she doesn't, which is sometimes subtle (the slow build-up to the revelation about [[UnsettlingGenderReveal Steff]]) and other times obvious (her overwrought FoeYay-based crush on the AlphaBitch, Sooni).

** ''Literature/TheTellTaleHeart'', which has the narrator, who insists at the very beginning that he is [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial not mad]], murdering a man and putting him under the floorboards but giving himself away because he imagines his victim's heart is still beating. This story is often used to [[SchoolStudyMedia introduce students]] to the concept of unreliable narrators in general.

%%* ''Literature/BlowingUpTheMovies'': Discussed in the essay on ''Film/{{Hero}}''.