What Is an Unreliable Narrator? | Definition & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 23
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 5
An unreliable narrator provides an author with the perfect opportunity to tell a story from an interesting character perspective and to pull off all types of ironic twists. A story told from the perspective of a character that the average audience identifies with can be boring to put it bluntly.
Things get interesting when a story is told from the point of view of someone whose outlook is distorted in some sort of way. Human nature being what it is, will always be attracted to what is different or unfamiliar. In addition, unreliable narrators can make literary analysis difficult because a good writer can hide behind the perspective of the narrator without readers being able to tell the author's voice apart from the narrator. Before we proceed, let’s define what this narrative phenomenon is:
An unreliable narrator is a narrative technique where the storyteller presents a story in a manner that is biased or unobjective.
Unreliable narrators can take many forms. It can come across as a narrator with a mental illness or some other type of mental or moral defect. It could be someone with prejudiced views against the person who is the object of the story being told.
One of the more famous examples of unreliable narrators in literature is the persona of the duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (published in 1842):
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
The poem relies on dramatic monologue, where we are allowed to eavesdrop on a one-sided conversation between two people. It begins normally enough with the duke showing off a painting of his last wife to an emissary from a family negotiating marriage between their daughter and the duke as depicted in the above passage. But we are shocked to find out that the duke had his wife killed over trifles. He’s a jealous and overcontrolling tyrant who believes that his wife should have reserved all her attention to him.
In his own words, she had “A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad.” He is referring to the fact that the wife smiled at sunsets and other things such as “The bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for her” and “the white mule / She rode with round the terrace.”
He has a polite way of expressing his tyrannical control and describes the killing of his wife as “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” His wife has now been reduced to a painting hidden behind a curtain, which others can see only if she draws that curtain aside. In short, he turned his wife into an artistic commodity that only he possesses and controls.
1. The unreliable narrator in The Telltale Heart
The Tell-Tale Heart (published in 1843) by Edgar Allan Poe is likely one of our earliest examples of an unreliable narrator. It is a short story that tells the tale of a man who murders someone else (an old man) because of his blue eyes. The story is told in the first-person narrative, and the speaker is clearly insane.
He more or less admits to his insanity by strangely denying it in the first paragraph of the short story:
True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
The persona in the story knows that he has a disease, but he does not call it madness. He simply describes it as a disease that sharpens his senses. It’s as if he is explaining his crime to a police officer who has arrested him and wants to know what happened. He goes on to explain how he killed the old man because of an eye, which appears to be dead or blinded:
I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
This is clearly a man with a mind that is unwell, compulsive, and obsessive. Despite his mental illness, he is still in possession of a brutal and calculating logic. One of the coldest lines in the history of literature describes the strategy he adopts in fooling his victim into letting his guard down:
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.
He murders the old man and buries him under the floorboards of the house, and he would have gotten away with it. However, while being questioned by police officers, he hears (due to his guilty conscience), the old man’s heart beating beneath the floor and is driven hysterical by it, forcing him to confess to the crime.
Poe presents a character with a disturbing internal conflict. His mental illness means that there is a disconnect between his guilty moral conscience and the cold and stealthy logic he uses to successfully plot, carry out, and get away with murder.
In the case of “My Last Duchess,” the persona speaking is cultured and cultivated and seemingly unaware of his own madness. There is incongruency between how he presents himself as an individual of class and refinement and his monstrous act of killing his wife and turning her into an artistic commodity.
Nonetheless, because of his wealth and status, he can get away with it, and the wider society accepts him as normal, probably from fear of the power that his wealth affords him, which can be deployed against those who displease him as was the case with his wife.
In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator is too far gone. Also, he has no wealth or social status to cover up his madness. All he has is his cleverness and stealth, which he gives up after admitting to committing the crime because of his guilty conscience. He has to deny being mad because he is aware that the whole world already sees him as such.
2. Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights (published in 1847) by Emily Brontë provides an example of innovative storytelling, which relies on the biased perspectives of several different narrators throughout the novel. All of these narrators can be described as unreliable. Bronte, as it were, maintains a kind of double artistic distance between herself as the author and the narrators telling the story.
A good example of this would be the introduction of one of the main characters of the play — Heathcliff. Heathcliff is of indeterminate racial origins. Scholars have speculated that he was most likely of Gypsy origin, and even possibly Black. Nobody knows for sure.
Nonetheless, his dark skin and otherness are highlighted through the novel. In this example of an unreliable narrator, we see a narrator named Nelly Dean, a servant, describe the introduction of Heathcliff into the Earnshaw household through a flashback:
We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad?
In this passage, Heathcliff is portrayed not even as a human being but as a thing. He is constantly referred to as “it.” He speaks a language that nobody understands and is described as a “black-haired child,’ which can be interpreted partly as an accurate description of his hair, as well as a reference to his dark skin color.
Nelly is an unreliable narrator because she is biased against Heathcliff for being an “other” or for not being White. She doesn’t admit it, but her description of a baby as “it” clearly signifies how she feels about him. This type of unreliable narrator, instead of being impaired by mental illness or egotism, as in the case of the duke and the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart, simply reflects the common prejudices of the wider society to which they belong.
We see that other characters, such as Mrs. Earnshaw, just as well, reflect these prejudices by referring to Heathcliff as “it.” We can even say that here Brontë is using artistic and ironic distance to critique the racist attitudes of her own society.
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3. Jane Eyre: When the author is an unreliable narrator
Now, we move on to another Brontë sister. This time, Charlotte Brontë and her famous novel Jane Eyre (published in 1847). We mentioned how Emily Brontë was delivering a cutting critique of Victorian racial attitudes, where Heathcliff is casually described as “it.”
In Jane Eyre, we may well have an example of another character being othered, not by other characters in the novel, but by the author herself. The character in question is Bertha, the wife of Mr. Rochester, the love interest of the main protagonist, Jane Eyre. In the novel, Bertha is an insane woman in the attic who thwarts the love affair between Jane and Mr. Rochester because she isn’t dead.
The novel achieves a satisfactory ending through a kind of deus ex machina where the insane wife burns down Mr. Rochester’s house and commits suicide. Brontë’s novel has been criticized for its poor treatment of Bertha. Her character is used as a narrative device to solve the insoluble problem or question: How can Jane be together with an immoral man who is in a hidden marriage with an insane woman?
Charlotte Brontë solves the problem by having the insane wife kill herself and burn the house down. Thus, Jane is free to get married and Mr. Rochester is given a chance to morally redeem himself by being injured and mutilated by the fire in the process of saving all of his servants and trying to save his wife.
Brontë even goes as far as demonizing Bertha as an “it” in a manner similar to how Heathcliff is othered by Nelly Dean. Here, Jane, the protagonist, is giving an account of how Bertha, who is mistaken for a ghost, visits her one night while sleeping in Mr. Rochester’s household:
It drew aside the window-curtain and looked out; perhaps it saw dawn approaching, for, taking the candle, it retreated to the door. Just at my bedside, the figure stopped: the fiery eyes glared upon me—she thrust up her candle close to my face, and extinguished it under my eyes. I was aware her lurid visage flamed over mine, and I lost consciousness: for the second time in my life—only the second time —I became insensible from terror.
Jane Eyre is a protagonist portrayed as having no major moral or mental impediments by the author, unlike the duke in “My Last Duchess” and the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart. We can assume that Bertha being referred to as an “it” reflects the author’s own attitudes toward her.
Bertha is portrayed as the daughter of a slave owner from the Caribbean. Her mental illness is the inheritance of the immoral trade and business that her family participates in. We could say that Charlotte Brontë has the same goal as her sister Emily in using he character of Bertha to condemn the racism associated with slavery.
However, this is done at the expense of proper character development for Bertha. Her portrayal was so lopsided that it even inspired an answer to Brontë’s novel by Jean Rhys, an author who was Creole, that is, a White person from the Caribbean.
Compare how she portrays Bertha to how Charlotte Brontë does in the novel The Wide Sargasso Sea (published in 1966), which can be seen as a prequel to Jane Eyre. In The Wide Sargasso Sea, we learn that Bertha’s name is actually Antoinette. It is Mr. Rochester who insists on referring to her as Bertha.
The following describes how Antoinette sets Mr. Rochester’s house on fire. Antoinette/Bertha recalls it as a dream that she will eventually re-enact. She first has to escape her jailer, Grace Poole, who has been hired by Mr. Rochester to keep Bertha imprisoned in the attic:
In my dream I waited till she began to snore, then I got up, took the keys and let myself out with a candle in my hand. It was easier this time than ever before and I walked as though I were flying. . . . All the people who had been staying in the house had gone, for the bedroom doors were shut, but it seemed to me that someone was following me, someone was chasing me, laughing. Sometimes I looked to the right or to the left, but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see the ghost of the woman they say that haunts this place.
In the last sentence, Antoinette refers to a ghost chasing her and laughing. The ghost in question is her mad self — Bertha. We can even go further than that. The ghost in question is the character of Bertha created by Charlotte Brontë, whom Antoinette desperately tries to escape, but in vain.
Cite this EminentEdit Article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 23). What Is an Unreliable Narrator? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/unreliable-narrator |
