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You just show that your first-person narrator was actually in an insane asylum and then OH MY GOD, did it actually happen? Who can say? Here, I can say. It didn't happen because your narrator was just no good. Listen. Never lend an unreliable narrator money.
The person telling you the story is a patent liar. His facts contradict each other. If you ask him to go back a bit and retell it, the events come out a little differently.
It is like dealing with a used-car salesman. You still want to hear the story because, buried somewhere under all the BS, is an actual car you might want to buy. In there, somewhere, is the real story.
And then there's the narrator that's unreliable because they are crazy...
As an author, this is a really hard trick to pull off. It is a lot easier to tell them what you are going to tell them, tell it, and then tell them what you said. Stray from that path, and you are into territory where you are assuming that the audience has a detectable EEG .
Another problem is that it's very easy to make this feel like a copout, especially if the work is a mystery and the solution is "the narrator did it."
One common technique is to use a Framing Device, so that the narrator is presented as a character in the frame story, to emphasize that he is not actually the author.
Related: This trope is more common in print than in film or on TV. Multiple unreliable narrators results in The Rashomon. If the picture contradicts the narration, it's an Unreliable Voiceover. Contrast Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane where the evidence is reliable but insufficient. If the contradictions and false statements are due to the narrator being insane, you're Through The Eyes Of Madness. If the narrator has honestly misunderstood what's going on due to naivety or inexperience, it's Innocent Inaccurate.
Note: REALLY BIG spoilers ahead, especially in the Literature section.
Examples:
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Anime
- Kyon from the Suzumiya Haruhi 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 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 knows much more than he admits, even to the reader.
- At the end of each episode, in the original 2006 summer broadcast, Kyon always refers to the wrong episode number from one perspective, while Haruhi corrects him every time (from her own continuity point of view) Both are replaced with Nagato delivering a deadpan tie-in to the next episode, in both the DVD release and expanded 2009 broadcast.
- Very well done in the Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni manga-only arc Onisarashi-hen. In the final chapter, it's revealed that the point-of-view character is responsible for every murder in the story.
- Also,Onikakushi-hen, although we only find out in later chapter. Rena and Mion were completely innocent, and Keiichi was hallucinating the Creepy Monotone, Hellish Pupils, and murder attempts.
- The narrator in Umineko No Naku Koro Ni (or the camera, in the anime) is pretty much the
king queen of this trope. Pretty much anything the main character doesn't see with his own eyes is highly suspect, at best. Halfway in, and it's still unclear if the series is a genuine mystery or merely a massive Mind Screw, since Beatrice is narrating most of the third-person sections and writing the TIPS.
- Genma Saotome from Ranma ½. Any time he tells a story you just know that isn't how it really happened.
- This goes double for Happosai.
- Jack Rakan of Mahou Sensei Negima is kind of like this whenever he relates any sort of Back Story, tending to massively exaggerate his own importance. That said, what he says is usually accurate...he just leaves out enormous chunks of the story because they don't involve him.
- Darker Than Black provides a healthy dose of Expo Speak early on, from a scientist who studies things that are under The Masquerade, no less. The next thing we see? Our expo-speaker did not even knew who she herself is and presumably was not allowed to have any really sensitive information at all. So, have a happy dish of common oversimplifications and tampered memories. You're on your own.
- Hell, 90% of everything anyone says in the first two episodes is misleading at best, and Blatant Lies at worst. We're looking at you, Hei.
- Madara Uchiha from Naruto. If nothing else the Kyuubi was a natural disaster. Or his brother gave him his eyes willingly? Why anyone believes anything he says...
- Played For Laughs in Slayers when Lina cheerfully recaps previous episodes — glossing over awkward moments that video recap does show. The second episode got:
Lina: In the end, peace was restored to the village (transition from the scene of nuking a dragon to the crater where this village once stood)
Lina: After bidding farewell to the grateful villagers... Gourry and I continue our journey (villagers chasing them with pitchforks)
Lina: Yeah, I know. But it's not a total lie, okay?
Comic Books
- It should be obvious at the beginning of Earth X that Uatu the Watcher is an unreliable narrator: he's an alien from a culture that has very different values from humanity's. It should be further obvious when Uatu does things like object to World War II on the grounds that "humanity was not yet ready for a master race". But most readers were used to Uatu's style of narration and problematic "neutral" moral stance from What If?, so Uatu manages to carry on the illusion that he's a friend of humanity for several more issues.
- Rorschach in Watchmen is a good example of this, especially when he talks about himself.
- The artwork actually uses an unreliable framing device (one of many the work contains) to show "Rorschach" in the first person and Walter Kovacs in the 3rd person (walking around in the background of the same chapter), leading to The Reveal. This both misdirects the audience as to who Rorschach is behind the mask, and contributes to the sense of Rorschach's disconnection from "the man in the mirror", so to speak.
- The depiction of Veidt's telling of his life story becomes quite different at it's conclusion when it has revealed that he's poisoned the servants he was supposedly talking to right from the start. What's more, the climax that follows is based almost entirely on playing with the audiences expectations of temporality.
- Ed Brubaker's Books of Doom miniseries tells the origin story of classic Marvel Comics supervillain Doctor Doom, seemingly narrated by Doom himself. However, at the story's end, it is revealed that the narrator is actually one of the Doom's Doombots, telling the story that Doom has programmed into it, leaving to question how much of it was true.
- The Strontium Dog revival used this as a retcon: the authors claimed that the classic series was folklore, and the new series was closer to the 'truth'.
- Word Of God states that Delios of 300 is an Unreliable Narrator; all of the supposed inconsistencies with actual history are actually bare-faced lies, with Delios stretching the truth about who did what and how many there were. This naturally justifies the comic's explicit use of Rule Of Cool and Refuge In Audacity.
- By extension, the same applies to the film adaptation. But just try telling this to your average jock / fratboy fan. Go on, I dare you.
- Calvin And Hobbes. Calvin's six year-old imagination has the tendency to run away with him, resulting in spectacular fantasy sequences featuring characters like Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, and Tracer Bullet. Then, of course, there's Hobbes himself, Calvin's stuffed tiger to whom he attaches a personality. Hobbes is even drawn differently when other characters are in the panel, to reflect how they see him as just a toy.
- Recent issues of The Boys have been about the backgrounds of other members of the titular group beyond Wee Hughie. Mother's Milk was relatively straight forward. Frenchie's was... not. This is partially justified by Frenchie being craaaaaaaazy.
Film
- The Usual Suspects. Agent Kujan spends the course of the movie listening to Verbal tell his story, then rejects portions of it as lies. The problem, of course, is that he rejects the WRONG portions.
- In Fallen, Denzel Washington does the narration, having us believe that Detective Hobbes is recollecting. However, in the last minutes, we learn Azazel, the demon possessing everyone, is actually the one talking and has escaped his Xanatos Gambit.
- The premise of Rashomon is that the story is told from four different points of view, all of which disagree, and all of which are unreliable, due to each character having a reputation to protect.
- The ending at least gives us the truth about what happened to the dagger, but with a very different motive than what the viewer might have assumed.
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari reveals in the end that the man who has been telling the story is in fact an inmate of an insane asylum, and the entire movie never happened; he just made it up based on the people around him.
- Fight Club has the unnamed narrator who turns out to have a split personality disorder and is also Tyler Durden
- Nearly every joke in Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human relies on the alien narrator misinterpreting human behavior.
- In Blade of Vengeance, the narrator is the female love interest. Her narratives are usually really weird. At the end of the movie, she's seen smoking opium, which explaining a lot.
- An early example of this occurred in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright, which opens with a flashback narrated by one of the characters who is lying to another character to obtain their help.
- The plot of Hero consists of the same story being retold three times with major differences: Nameless' BS story he told so that he could get an audience with the emperor and have a shot at assassinating him, the emperor finally calling Nameless on his BS and telling what he thinks really happened, and Nameless finally admitting what REALLY happened just before he tries to kill the emperor.
- In the Korean horror/suspense film A Tale of Two Sisters, this trope only becomes apparent at the end. It starts out fairly normal, with two sisters returning home to their father and stepmother. It starts to get confusing, with the unexplained appearance of some wraith-like girl under the sink, various objects and people disappearing and reappearing without explanation, and all sorts of contradictory information. Eventually the stepmother murders one of the girls, only it's revealed immediately after that it never happened. It turns out one of the girls was pretending to be both herself, her stepmother, and her sister. The sister who was supposedly murdered had died a long time ago in an accident, and the stepmother was simply the nurse taking care of the two when said accident happened, which the girl blames for her sister's death. Are you confused yet?
- Tracey Berkowitz of The Tracey Fragments. Maybe.
- Big Fish has an unusual take on the Unreliable Narrator, in that the flashback stories are assumed to be pure fiction for most of the movie and the twist is that the father may actually be more reliable than was thought. The appearance of the twins, Giant and Ringmaster at the father's funeral clearly leaves the son reeling as he reassesses his father's stories for where exactly they diverged from the truth.
- The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie: After the opening movie theater parody, the story supposedly begins millions of years ago, in 1492, at 3pm, in Egypt. Then a modern airplane flies by. It turns out this is a story Master Shake is telling Meatwad, and to make it worse, Meatwad is in the story. In fact, pretty much every character in this film is an Unreliable Narrator.
- The gorgeous and terribly underrated The Fall plays some fun games with this trope. It is a film of two levels, stories within stories - a girl in a hospital listens to stories told by a bedridden man, and we see her visualisations of the stories he tells. Trouble is, they don't share identical internal dictionaries. One great example is that he talks about an indian and his squaw, but the girl, who was friends with a Sikh, imagines a bearded subcontinental man in a turban. The Fall also features a classic example of fictionalised Creator Breakdown. Seriously, though, see it.
- Memento. Lenny may be trying to report accurately, but his grasp on the real past is, to put it mildly, highly questionable.
- Played straight, for laughs, and for drama in Forrest Gump. The naive Forrest incorrectly describes events he witnesses through his life. Notable examples: He believes that Charlie was someone the Army was looking for, opposed to the code name for the Vietcong, and Apple computers as a fruit company even though he made a fortune by investing in them.
- Joker in The Dark Knight provides differing accounts for how exactly he got his scars, leaving you wishing he'd have more chances to terrorize victims with more colorful variations.
- the film Secret Window, Secret Garden, (based on Stephen King's novella, which is narrated in third person) the narrator is stalked by a psychopath who accuses him of plagiarizing his book, and who attempts to frame him for several heinous crimes. In the climax, it is revealed that the narrator has been driven to madness over his guilt for plagiarizing a classmate in college, and is unconsciously committing the acts for which he thinks he's being framed. The stalker does not exist outside his own mind (although the novella hedges a bit on this point).
- In the novella, he isn't the narrator, it's written in a third-person narrative.
- Monster A Go Go has the ultimate Unreliable Narrator. Whaddaya mean there was no monster, beauzeau?
- Bubba Ho Tep The stories Elvis and JFK share about themselves and how they ended up in a Texas nursing home are VERY speculative and unreliable.
Literature
Live Action TV
- The Black Donnellys: The narrator ("Ice Cream") puts himself into the story in places where he couldn't have been, gets dates wrong by a year or so, and just has the general demeanor of not being a guy whose facts are ready to bank. On the flip side, the story he tells does not make him seem like a Marty Stu. He gets shut down by the ladies. He never plays a pivotal role in the events of the story. This leads us to believe we can accept at least some of what he is saying. Naturally, the series was canceled.
- Jimmy Ice Cream generally gives the sense of wishing he had brothers like the Donnellys, and that's why he inserts himself into the story, in a hopeful-sad attempt to feel like part of them while he's really an outsider. Sometimes it seems like he may have been there, and usually it seems like it was probably another Donnelly or sometimes Jenny who was really there. I usually wanted to give Jimmy a hug, and maybe some ice cream.
- How I Met Your Mother occasionally plays with this, not because Ted is lying per se, but because of ordinary memory lapses (having a character named Blah Blah because he can't recall her name), subjective interpretation of ordinary events (showing Robin's forty-something date as elderly), or sanitizing the story for
his children network TV (using "I'm getting too old for this stuff" instead of "shit".). The few times he tells us things that seem to defy reality (such as Lily and Marshall escaping their own party by jumping out the window or having a Teen Wolf on a kids' basketball team), he Hand Waves it by saying that's all he heard about it.
- Garak on Star Trek Deep Space Nine did this deliberately, especially in the episode The Wire, because as a former secret agent of the Cardassian Obsidian Order he liked obfuscating his own past and never told a truth if a lie would suffice.
Bashir: So of the stories you told me, which ones were true?
Garak: My dear doctor, all of them were true.
Bashir: What about the lies?
Garak: Especially the lies!
- Dexter often mentioned his lack of any emotions in his narration, which is increasingly obviously untrue, especially in season two. He's not lying to the audience so much as he simply doesn't understand a lot of human nature.
- In one segment of Mad TV, Aries Spears tells a story as a photomontage of the events he's detailing accompanies. We start with Aries hanging out on the roof, where he goes to chill out in his downtime, and noting that this would be a great place to launch a glider. After this point, the wholesome and educational narrative he details begins to subtly (and, very very shortly, not so subtly) diverge from the things we're seeing, and ends with Aries high as a kite on glue fumes, under the impression that one of the other actors, aware of what has happened and concerned for Aries' safety, is some kind of demon out to kill him.
- The Dharma orientation films of Lost are narrated by Francois Chau's variably named character. The Swan film is located "behind The Turn of the Screw" on the bookshelf, tipping the audience in advance that perhaps "Marvin Candle" is not to be trusted.
- Hard to prove, but Kevin of The Wonder Years may fall under this. He is recalling events to him long past, and while the broad details are likely accurate, consider that the older brother and some of the pre-Women's Lib neighborhood girls get away with a lot of hitting. Also, when unfairness, especially parental, hits Kevin, it seems to focus on him exclusively, making you wonder if his older self is letting the filters of nostalgia and occasional bitterness influence his re-telling.
- The premiere episode has Kevin recalling that he was a 'pretty fair athlete' while showing a perfectly thrown football pass bounce off his chest.
- Malcolm In The Middle!
- In The Trial of a Time Lord, the
Brickyard Valeyard has tampered with the evidence in the Matrix, espcially in Mindwarp, to make the Doctor's conviction certain.
- In the more recent Doctor Who story, The Unicorn And The Wasp, Agatha Christie questions the attendees at an outdoor party regarding a recent murder. As the suspects each give their story, we see the events that they describe, but as they really happened. Example, one young man claimed to be wandering alone, but in the flashback scene it's shown that he was flirting with another man. His father lies not only about what he was doing but also what he was reminiscing about at the time, leading to a flashback-within-a-flashback.
- In the fourth-season M*A*S*H episode 'The Novocaine Mutiny', Frank and Hawkeye give wildly differing accounts of the same event.
- BBC sitcom Coupling had numerous examples of unreliable narrators, notably pretty much anything said by either Jeff or Jane. But the greatest example of was in the third season episode Remember This, where Patrick and Sally's individual recollections of how they met match in many, but not all details, to great comedic effect. In particular, the print of Munch's The Scream that the exceedingly drunk Sally remembers is revealed to be a mirror in Patrick's memories.
- The X Files. In "The Unnatural" an alcoholic ex-cop tells Mulder how he encountered an alien posing as a famous Negro baseball player in 1947 Roswell; a story that even Mulder finds hard to believe. When Mulder tries fitting these facts into what he knows about the Government Conspiracy, the cop basically tells him to just shut up and enjoy the tale.
- The X Files used this trope very frequently, especially in the more comedic episodes, like "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" and "Bad Blood."
- In Dollhouse Bennett's memory of how her arm was crippled shows Caroline abandoning her to save herself. Caroline's own memory is later seen, and shows her trying to dislodge the rubble pinning Bennett, then explaining that as an employee Bennett can pretend she wasn't involved, and pinning her ID badge to her to make this more obvious before leaving. Which seems very thorough. The apparent implication is that Bennett's memory is incomplete, though depending on how you view Caroline, one might consider both of them to fall under this.
- The Janitor from Scrubs is a pathological liar. He tells the most bizzare tales about his past and doesn't even keep track of what is true in them, if any at all. Or maybe he does but just wants to screw with you.
Music
- Many of Randy Newman's songs fit this trope: "Sail Away" is a "sales pitch" for life in America told from the point of view of a slaver, "Political Science" features a "narrator" who posits that the United States should "drop the Big One" on every nation in the world (except Australia) because of a lack of international respect - and that's just a couple examples.
- Most of the Barenaked Ladies song "The Old Apartment" is meant to imply that the narrator has broken into his ex-girlfriend's apartment in a fit of creepy stalkerishness. Toward the end of the song, he reveals that he and the girlfriend are still together, and have just moved to a nicer house; he's broken into their old place in a fit of creepy nostalgia.
- The protagonist of King Diamond's concept album "The Graveyard" claims that he was thrown into a mental hospital because he threatened to expose a politician as a child molester. Since the entire album is from his point of view, and he's an insane killer, it's not clear if he's telling the truth or just crazy.
- The refrain of Gaelic Storm's "Johnny Tarr" goes: "Even if you saw it yourself you wouldn't believe it/But I wouldn't trust a person like me if I were you/Sure I wasn't there - I swear I have an alibi/I heard it from a man who knows a fella who swears it's true". The story told in the song is borderline fantasy, wherein the title character dies of thirst in the middle of a drinking contest.
Newspaper Comics
- Some members of the For Better Or For Worse Hatedom point out that a lot of events are communicated to the readers by having one character tell another, such that we get this information second or even third hand. This treatment is notably applied to Anthony's ex-wife, Therese - the audience sees very little of her, and almost everything we know about her is communicated by other characters when she's not present. As a result some question just how accurate the portrayal of Therese as an evil harpy really is.
Radio
- Dickensian parody Bleak Expectations uses this in the framing story for laughs:
"We swore we would escape the school, or die in the attempt."
"And what happened?"
"We died in the attempt."
"Oh, how awful!"
"Of course not, you blundering idiot! How would I be talking to you now?"
- Doctor Who audio "And The Pirates" is told by Evelyn and the Doctor. Evelyn gets many of the facts wrong and is caught making up names on the spot, such as "John Johnson" and "Tom Thompson". She even initially says the Doctor died mere minutes after saying he'll be around to tell more of the story. Parts are told out of order, and all the sailors have the same voice because she can't impersonate them well. The Doctor's version of events is much more accurate but suspiciously full of characters complementing his unorthodox wardrobe.
Tabletop RPG
- Nearly all of the background material for Warhammer 40000 is told from possibly inaccurate histories and skewed propoganda pieces, making the exact nature of the setting dubious at best.
- Much like the above Warhammer example, all of the material on Battle Tech is written from an in-universe perspective, always of some particular person or organization. This goes for everything, even the technical readouts on new 'Mechs and such. Com Star was the original viewpoint group, but it has sense branched out to every faction. Some of the earlier books had significant errors (people doing things before their stated date of birth, using 'Mechs that hadn't been invented yet, etc), and the in-universe perspective allowed them to chalk it up to different perspectives. It also allowed them to Ret Con things that they didn't want.
- Notably used as a justification for adventure hooks in Unknown Armies, in the form of rumours that may or may not be true as the GM decides. One example: "Bigfoot has a social security number".
- Almost all source materials for games set in Greg Stafford's "Glorantha" (Rune Quest, Hero Quest, Dragon Pass, Nomad Gods) along with books (King of Sartar) are written in the style of Unreliable Narrators with no one absolute truth.
- Large parts of Shadowrun supplements were written as posts on an online message board, and the authors were ever eager to point out that anything could be wrong, exaggerated, or invented.
- All of the world background in White Wolf's old World Of Darkness is presented in this way. This is most notable in the clanbooks/tribebooks etc. Each Vampire clan tells a different version of history in which their own clan is somehow older, smarter and generally more awesome than all the others.
- The largest one: Demon The Fallen. We never get the other viewpoint, and the viewpoint we do get is filtered through several millennia of resentment.
- Many 2nd edition Dungeons And Dragons sourcebooks, and most notably the Planescape ones, are assigned specific narrators. (This also includes the Ravenloft Van Richten's Guides and a bunch of others) Planescape had more unreliable narrators than others, considering the fact that at least one of them was certfiably insane by human standards...
- An especially interesting example of this was the Netheril: Empire of Magic sourcebook that described said lost civilization in the Forgotten Realms. Except one particular archwizard of immense power was never mentioned in the entire book, despite being a prominent figure. That is, until you start to try to figure out who the narrator was...
- And like Warhammer 40000 the regular Warhammer Fantasy books are also written in an unreliable sort of way.
Video Games
- Properly applied, Unreliable Narrator can be used as an in game explanation of why the character dies and is resurrected by whatever means. even if there isn't a narrator explicitly stated, the player can assume a reset after a character's demise was the narrator of the tale suddenly remembering that wasn't how it went.
- Common in Interactive Fiction, where it can be used for comedy, as in Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("Okay, I was just joking, you really can't go west."), or for suspense, as in Andrew Plotkin's Spider and Web, (where the entire first half of the game is a spy's "confession" under interrogation, and he's trying to mislead his interrogator).
- In Photopia, the narrator of the fantasy segments turns out to be a babysitter who is telling the story to a little girl with her as the protagonist.
- More than one puzzle in the aforementioned Hitchhiker game relies on the player working out that some of the room descriptions are lies. The game eventually gives in and admits the truth if you look at it hard enough.
- Make It Good relies heavily on this. The player plays as a hardboiled detective, send to investigate a murder scene, but various little clues eventually reveal the PC was directly involved in the murder, and the goal changes from identifying the murderer to subtly meddling with the evidence and getting the blame off yourself.
- Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII seemed to have several retellings on a key event in the past before the game makes you play through his subconscious to figure out what the hell really happened.
- Cloud's narration of the events is completely accurate, in terms of events that took place. The only really unreliable aspect is that he told the story as though he was Zack.
- Final Fantasy X has a particularly interesting example of this trope. Much of the game is told as a flashback by the main character. While not necessarily deceptive, he also does not reveal a number of key points. This parallels his process of discovery; the player isn't told anything explicitly until the point in the story where the narrator himself first learned them.
- In the video game Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow, most of the game is Jack recounting his adventures. Being Jack Sparrow, he exaggerates things quite a bit, which is sometimes lampshaded by having other characters point out factual innacuracies in his stories. This allows the game to include giant spiders, frozen vikings, and a very different version of the events of the first movie.
- Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time is framed as the Prince telling the story of what happened to him. The game over voiceovers say things like "no, wait... that's not what happened... let's go back a bit." lampshading the fact that the full story apparently includes things like "and then I misjudged the jump and fell to my death on the jagged rocks below... no, wait..."
- Perhaps somewhat justified by the titular sands invoking half a dozen Time Travel Tropes throughout the game, anyone who was actually inside of the events ought to be confused afterwards. Or before.
- Viewtiful Joe features a narrator attempting to make Joe's actions look heroic. The truth is Joe is having a blast being a superhero, completely forgets about his captured girlfriend, and more or less arrives where she is accidentally.
- The main character of Metal Gear Solid 2 is a rookie soldier who trained extensively in VR and has never been in actual combat before. Only he isn't a rookie. He was a child soldier who served under Solidus Snake and has since spent his life acting as though it never happened and carefully suppressing memories of what he went through.
- The World Ends With You has Hanekoma writing about the Fallen Angel throughout his secret reports—seriously, why would anyone teach Minamimoto the Dangerous Forbidden Technique?! Well, of course Mr. H was the Fallen Angel all along.
- In Hitman Bloodmoney, the game takes place in flashbacks being told in an interview by former FBI director "Jack" Alexander Leland Cayne, who's account contains multiple inconsitencies with what actually happens in the game. It turns out that Cayne founded "The Franchise" and was behind the "The Agencies" destruction and part of a plot to assassinate the President so that he couldn't forward his pro-cloning policy, allowing for Alpha Zerox continued monopoly on cloning. At the end of the game, Diana revives 47 in the funeral house and 47 kills everyone on the premise, including Cayne and the reporter performing the interview.
- This is sort of a selling point for The Elder Scrolls series. There is no true canon except what happens during the game, and every person or book's version of the backstory (of which there are several, backstories and versions that is) has to be taken with a grain of salt. Essentially, the only information you learn about the game world is the stuff you could learn by actually being there. Combine this with the depth of the world itself and the number of different overlapping mythologies and cultures in said world, and you wind up with a lot of really damn weird discussions on the forums with cosmological debates rivaling those of, well, the real world.
- Vivec embodies this trope, being a self-professed pathological liar and implied madman who provides most of the series' cosmology.
- Every character in Twisted Metal: Black narrates their tale during the three cutscenes (opening, mid-game flashback, and ending). However, at least two of them find that the truth is far from what they thought... and neither get a happy ending.
- The Silent Hill series has two unreliable narrators: James in the second and Alex in the fifth.
- Captain Qwark in the Ratchet And Clank series built his career by telling bogus stories about his heroics that were either actually done by someone else or never actually happened. This is actually a major point in the Secret Agent Clank spinoff, where there are entire gameplay parts based on Qwark's ridiculous narrations. Amusingly, one of Qwark's apparent fabrications are "robotic pirate ghosts"... until Tools of Destruction revealed the existence of robot Space Pirates and Quest for Booty featured undead Robot Space Pirates, thus making his story seem much more plausible...
- Umineko No Naku Koro Ni loves this trope in unhealthy ways, with an omniscient narrator who wants to convince the protagonist to believe in witches, and gleefully fictionalises whole conversations, ghost sightings, characters, relationships and killings. Figuring out what 'really happened' from the thinnest of clues is the main draw of the game. It reaches such a point that in the second game, the author added in special text that will always be true. Unfortunately, in one arc, you might get four lines of that, while everything else could be pure crap.
- It gets even more confusing considering how there's now second special text which implies that the first special text is lies and that the second text could be the truth or could be a lie.
- Haldos in Nexus War follows this trope closely, although despite plenty of Kick the Dog behavior on his part and the fact that he openly admits to learning what he knows directly from the Big Bad, there's nothing to actually disprove his claims.
- Lampshaded in Penny Arcade Adventures where the narrator right at the start sets doubt in the player's mind as to his identity and motivation. "Please, do not dwell on my... mysterious identity. You're dwelling on it, aren't you?"
- Psychonauts, being a game that takes place mostly inside people's minds, brings this up at times, though a little digging makes the real stories clear. Notable are Gloria's biographical "plays" (a bit warped by her own point of view of her childhood), Edgar's
girlfriend wife (a deliberate romanticization), and Coach Oleander's memories of the military ( completely fake).
- Braid ...that is, if you're somehow able to figure out what the heck it's supposed to "really" be about.
- Given that she gives you a lot of exposition, from background of the Mandalorian Wars to the whys of the Jedi Civil War to the reason the Exile was... exiled by the Jedi Council, Kreia fits this description.
Webcomics
- One of the characters in Flying Man and Friends, Harbor the loon, is convinced that his belly and the bottle of eggnog he carries with him count as two separate characters. This is never refuted, so it's his word against dead silence. In one strip, he somehow detonates an atomic bomb that is never explained (and is eventually undone). The entire story is unreliable.
- In a story arc in early Order of the Stick, Durkon is lost in a dungeon with a female dwarf named Hilgya, and he's starting to fall for her. She tells him the story of how she came to be with the Linear Guild, where she's married against her will to a cruel husband who refuses to understand her needs, so she runs away to make her own life. The panels below her narration show that the "cruel husband" was in fact an extremely pleasant guy who was thrilled to be so lucky as to be married to a dwarf like Hilgya, and whose only need out of the relationship appeared to be meeting hers. In fact, in one panel he asks if she'd like a footrub, to which Hilgya responded, "You're crushing my spirit!" It doesn't matter which story Durkon believes, though-he's shocked either way, and commands her to return to her husband, telling her that doing your duty is everything that it means to be a dwarf, even or especially if it makes you miserable.
- The Nightmare Fuel-ish animated short arc "Twist, twist, twist" in Jack. "I'm in hell because I love my wife ... imagine that."
- A Sluggy Freelance strip features Gwynn showing Torg one of Oasis's knives as evidence that Riff and Zoë are dead; after speaking with a psychiatrist, he realizes that it wasn't a knife, but the necklace that had bonded to Zoë.
- Mega Tokyo has a consistent running theme of different perceptions of reality and what events fit into which character's reality, creating what is, in effect, an entire cast of unreliable narrators -what is perfectly obvious and logical for one character is dismissed out of hand as impossible by another, if it gets noticed at all.
- Of course, considering how often it comes up, even so far as to be lampshaded by both characters and the author, this is probably more of an Unreliable Author.
- Also, since all of the examples above are about Pirovision being unable to see Largoland, it's worth pointing out that it works both ways.
Web Original
- Oktober a collection of journal entries from each of the main characters. Now, obviously, journal entries aren't going to be entirely accurate, so sometimes minor discrepancies appear. Other times though...
Western Animation
- A truly bizarre example in The Emperors New Groove: at one point, the Emperor breaks the fourth wall to argue with the narrator's version of events. The twist being that Kuzco is narrator.
- Kuzco-the-narrator has been casting himself as a victim even as the events we see show that Kuzco is at least as much at fault for being a self-centered Jerkass as anyone else is. That Kuzco-the-guy-whose-life-sucks-right-now tells him off for embellishing the story is a sign that he's maturing into the thoughtful, kindly emperor he's going to become at the end of the movie, and we don't hear from Kuzco-the-narrator again.
- Two Looney Tunes cartoons, The Trial of Mr. Wolf and Turn Tale Wolf, have the Big Bad Wolf tell alternate versions of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs, respectively, with him as the victim.
- One episode of Batman The Animated Series focuses on 3 kids talking about different stories of who Batman is. Each one referencing a different Comic Book style for Batman.
- The first story in Gotham Knight, "Have I Got a Story" also does this. Where each kid describes Batman differently from a different point in a single chase (in reverse order). The first describes a Shadow demon, second strikes a similar figure as Manbat, third is a robot. When Batman shows up he is, of course, human.
- Both of those episodes are derived from a comics story — Batman #250's "The Batman Nobody Knows."
- In the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, teasers and recaps are narrated by a character who plays a prominent role within the episode. In the episode "Rogue in the House, part 2", said duty falls upon Zog, a brain-damaged Triceraton which the turtles—taking advantage of the fact that Zog believes them to be Triceratons—recruited in the previous episode. Despite accurate visuals, Zog's narration states what he wrongly believes is actually happening—that the turtles are a Triceraton sabotage unit, the Foot are Federati.
- An odd subversion occurs in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Clopin, a clown who appears onscreen and speaks directly to the viewer, is our narrator. At first he seems to be totally detached from the story, merely recounting the tale as it unfolds and ignoring the fourth wall. Then during the festival sequence, Clopin shows up as a character in the narrative, MCing the Festival of Fools and remaining strictly within the fourth wall. Even more oddly, he's gone from wishing the best for Quasimodo in song to making a mockery of him by crowning him the ugliest person at the festival. Later in the film, Clopin appears again, this time as a murderous, seemingly insane criminal who stages a Joker Jury trial and tries to hang Quasimodo. Again, he stays within the fourth wall throughout this sequence. Finally, at the end of the movie, he's a narrator again, and finishes off the movie with a nice little song about how we should all see the good inside of people and Quasimodo is a great guy...this after Clopin tried to murder him earlier in the movie. So, is Clopin an actor playing contradictory roles within the story? Is he meant to represent multiple people? And considering that he tried to murder the protagonist yet ends the film by literally singing his praises, can we trust anything he's told us?
- Perhaps Clopin was NEVER aware of the fourth wall. The Court of Miracles sequence has him acting more than a bit unhinged, up to and including talking to himself. Maybe his "narration" is just more of his mad ramblings and he's actually talking to thin air?
- It is seen at the beginning that he is performing a puppet show to little children during his narration... A likely explanation would be that his prologue/epilogue appearances occur after the events of the story, when he has "seen the light" concerning the innocence of Quasimodo, making the bulk of the movie Clopin's flashback based upon hearsay. This could even be used to justify the vast differences between the movie and the original book... something like "Hey kids, here's this funny guy's musical interpretation of this big thing that happened that one time with that one guy!" Also, his seemingly inconsistent character is justified by the fact that on the surface world of Paris he is a jovial, colorful entertainer trying to make money and impress the townsfolk, but in the court of miracles (the secret Gypsy underworld) he is a brutal leader of a minority living in constant fear of persecution. He was going to execute Quasimodo because Clopin had correctly deduced that Quasi had inadvertently fulfilled Frollo's plan to find and exterminate the Gypsies by being tricked into leading him and the soldiers to the Gypsy hideout.
- The Narrator in the Earthworm Jim animated series not only often has no idea what's actually happening, he's also, at least once, bullied into reading a scene transition to the benefit of one of the villians. "Hey, Narrator guy. Read this or I'll disperse your molecules." "Oh. Erm...Later, Psy-Crow and Professor Monkey-For-A-Head have defeated the evil Queen." <Scene transition to this having already happened>.
Real life
- Schliemann, archaeologist. Yes, he did achieve quite a lot. Digging up Troy for example(destroying quite a bit of it in the process). His part of the story always leaves out those inconvenient little things like, you know, bribery, black market, some legal things, nothing big, really. And backstabbing his benefactor Frank Calvert (by not crediting him and basically taking away his land) who just happened to lack funds enough to do the research himself? Wherever did you get that idea?
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. There's no doubt that Cellini was a great artist, but he was also an incredible egotist, judging by all the self-congratulation, exaggeration and distortion in his autobiography. That does make it an entertaining read, of course.
- Most small children tend to be this when telling you a story or their side of the events of something.
- Actually, everyone is an unreliable narrator. We self-edit our memories of events, usually to cast ourselves in a better light or look less guilty, we mix up events, we forget things, or we even plain just start makes things up. This even happens whether we intend to or not. For example, Ulric Neisser did an experiment on the day after the Challenger Disaster, where he had all of his students fill out a detailed questionnaire of what they were doing when they first hear about it; then, 2 years later, he had the same students try to remember the events and rewrite the same questionnaire. The result was that only 10% of the subjects remembered all of the major details correctly (25% of the subject got every scrap of detail wrong). This is because of all the events and stimuli that the brain processes, only a small amount is coded down as long-term memory and neural connections, we mostly resort to filling in the gaps to string together a coherent narrative.
- This is also why eyewitness testimony is considered the most untrustworthy piece of evidence in court
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