1One of the most fascinating devices in modern fiction is the narrator we cannot fully trust.
2Such narrators may lie to the reader, or they may simply fail to understand what is happening around them.
3The reader must read between the lines and slowly build a truer picture of the events.
4Children, madmen, and criminals have all served as unreliable narrators in famous novels of the past century.
5This technique turns reading into an active game rather than a passive act of receiving information.
6We notice small contradictions, strange silences, and details that the narrator seems anxious to avoid.
7Gradually we realise that the real story is hidden underneath the story we are told.
8Critics argue that all first person narrators are unreliable to some degree, because memory itself is unreliable.
9Writers love this device because it forces readers to think and to question every sentence they read.
10When the final truth appears, we often want to read the whole novel again from the beginning.
11Few pleasures in literature equal the moment when a clever narrator is finally seen through.