Can a narrator lie to you and still play fair?
In one of Agatha Christie's best-known mysteries, the narrator hides his crime in plain sight without writing a single false sentence.
▶ Start the storySometimes, and the most famous case does not even need to lie. An unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted or whose credibility is compromised. The critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term in 1961, in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. The puzzle is how a novel can mislead you and still be fair.
Spoiler warning for a famous mystery. In Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the story is told by Dr James Sheppard. At the end, Hercule Poirot reveals that Sheppard himself is the killer. Sheppard has been using literary techniques to hide his guilt without writing anything untrue. At the moment he slipped a dictaphone into his bag and moved a chair, he simply wrote: "I did what little had to be done." Every word is true, and almost nothing is told.
Step 1: Write only true sentences
Nothing the narrator writes is untrue
Step 2: Skip the key action
"I did what little had to be done"
Step 3: Reveal at the end
Poirot names the narrator as the killer
Step 4: Reread
The clues were there all along
The book was one of Christie's most controversial, and its twist had a big impact on the genre. Yet when a critic, John Goddard, analysed whether Christie cheats, he concluded that the charge of cheating fails.
That is the lesson for a reader. Critics watch for signs that a narrator contradicts themself, has gaps in memory or lies to other characters. Sometimes a narrator is naive, like Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield, and sometimes the unreliability is held back until near the end. In every case the story sits in the gap between what the narrator says and what you can work out for yourself.
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Recap
Unreliability lives in the gap between what a narrator says and what a reader can work out, and critics argue over whether that gap is measured against the author's norms or the reader's world.
💡 A trick to remember it · Treat a narrator like a witness under cross-examination: check what he says, what he skips and how he judges it.
Surprising fact · Dr Sheppard's famous line "I did what little had to be done" hides the moment he conceals his crime.
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Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (18 claims) cites at least one of these.