Unreliable narrator

Classification

William Riggan analyzed four types of unreliable first-person narrators in a 1981 study. The pícaro is an antihero whose behavior is marked by rebelliousness and pessimism, with a gap between his entertaining account and the perceptions of the author and reader; examples include Apuleius in The Golden Ass and Lázaro in Lazarillo de Tormes. The clown narrator uses irony, ambiguities, and reversals, as seen in Folly in In Praise of Folly and Tristram Shandy in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The madman narrator is untrustworthy due to an unbalanced mind, often exhibiting traits such as being withdrawn, self-deluding, and perversely logical; examples include Poprishchin in Diary of a Madman and narrators in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories.

Definitions and theoretical approaches

Wayne C. Booth defined a reliable narrator as one who speaks in accordance with the implied author's norms, and an unreliable narrator as one who does not. Peter J. Rabinowitz criticized this definition for relying on external norms and ethics, and instead focused on the status of fictional discourse, proposing four types of audience: actual, authorial, narrative, and ideal narrative.

Tamar Yacobi offered a model of five criteria for determining unreliability. Ansgar Nünning reconceptualized unreliability within frame theory and readers' cognitive strategies, making it a reader's strategy for reconciling discrepancies, thus eliminating reliance on value judgments. Greta Olson later debated both Nünning's and Booth's models.

Signals of unreliable narration

Signals of unreliability can be divided into three categories: intratextual signs such as self-contradiction or lying; extratextual signs like contradicting general world knowledge or logic; and the reader's literary competence, including knowledge of genres and stylistic devices.