What is an unreliable narrator?

I have been listening to people talk about unreliable narrators for a long time, and it seems to me that the definition has broadened over the years. Back when I was still taking English classes, an unreliable narrator was one you couldn’t and shouldn’t trust at all. The classic example was Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the narrator is deliberately misleading the reader until the final pages by neglecting to mention certain key facts.

Lately, though, the term seems to be increasingly applied to any narrator who is not sticking absolutely to real-life-verifiable facts, including “verifiable facts” about themselves. Applied rigorously, this means that any narrator who is not human—an elf, a space alien, a talking rabbit, a superhero—is automatically unreliable, not because they are liars, but merely because they don’t exist in real life. (I actually saw an article that argued that a ghost was automatically an “unreliable narrator” because ghosts don’t exist.)

People who think like that do not, in my opinion, understand fiction. At all.

In actuality, as soon as you interpret the term “unreliable narrator” strictly, all narrators are unreliable. No viewpoint character has all the information about what is going on (unless you count an omniscient narrator as a character, and I’ll get to that in a minute). Viewpoint characters may have strongly held opinions that color their interpretation of the facts (and it is practically impossible to write an interesting novel in which the viewpoint character has no opinion of anything, even if it is merely that their cereal is too sweet or their neighbor’s car is ugly). Hiding the viewpoint character’s opinions means they are presenting a false picture of themselves; presenting their opinions as the character would say or think about them presents, at best, a slanted picture of the facts. Either one makes the character unreliable about something.

Characters may have plot- or characterization-important things that they don’t want to talk about, ranging from angsty or traumatic backstory, to recent actions of which they are ashamed, to events they fear will mean jail time. The viewpoint character may be too trusting, or too skeptical, of whatever they’re being told by other characters (who also have opinions, lack complete information, and don’t want to admit things).

One might possibly make an exception for an omniscient narrator—omniscient narrators are supposed to know everything, by definition, which means they ought to be reliable—but even an omniscient narrator cannot say everything. The author has to decide what facts the reader absolutely must have; which ones aren’t totally necessary but still give extra depth, meaning, and understanding to the story; and which ones are pointless digressions. When the main character unexpectedly has to resettle sixty refugee families, very few stories proceed to spend forty pages listing the members of each and every family, their housing requirements, their occupations and talents, and the possible placements where they could be sent, even though the omniscient narrator obviously knows all of that. At most, the narrator will provide key details about any of the refugees who will be important later in the story; if none of them will ever be seen again, the reader gets a one-sentence summary—“It took three days to find proper placements for all sixty families.”

Omniscient narrators are also perfectly capable of misleading readers by deliberately leaving out important information. What they say may be entirely factual—there was a gun on the mantlepiece on Story Day 1 and a gun on the mantlepiece on Story Day 5—but if the narrator doesn’t mention that the gun on Day 1 was a handgun and the one on Day 5 was a sniper rifle, the reader is very likely to draw incorrect conclusions.

In short, taking such a broad view of the term “unreliable narrator” makes the term into a useless and unnecessary synonym for “narrator.” I find it more useful to stick to the definition as I first learned it—someone whom the reader cannot and should not trust. Making a genuine mistake does not make a character unreliable. Deliberately and repeatedly lying to the reader obviously does. A narrator who lies to every other character in the story, and who accurately reports those lies to the reader in the privacy of their thoughts or journal, is not unreliable as a narrator, though none of the other characters in the story should trust them for a minute.

As with everything in writing, there’s a grey middle area where you find characters whose personal biases, lack of knowledge, personal experience, or strong opinions lead them to misinterpret events, and to report those misinterpretations to the reader as facts. Exactly where someone draws the line between “inadvertent but realistic unreliability” and “deliberately misleading the reader” varies, and authors and readers sometimes draw their lines in different places. This can’t be helped, even when it is extremely irritation. Such as when someone considers a ghost an unreliable narrator in a work of fiction…