Stuart's Daily Word Spot: Unreliable narrator

Unreliable narrator: Aliterary term for a narrator who, out of ignorance, bias, limited viewpoint,simple self-interest or through inability to tell the truth, cannot be trusted.Generally, this character appears in first person stories, of course. Probablythe most well-know is Humbert Humbert, the wicked teller of VladimirNabokov's tale, Lolita. In my own romanticthriller, BreakingFaith, I employed the device of paired narrators, allowing the reader tosee things from the points of view of both the male and female protagonists. Idid this to illustrate that even the most well-meaning and honest of narratorscan sometimes be unreliable and mislead the reader, even if unintentionally.
Other examples of unreliable narrators are:Wuthering Heights - Lockwood and Nelly Dean.Wilkie Collins' detective story  The Moonstone  (1868), in which theplot unfolds through different characters, who contradict each other and revealtheir biases.In Ken Kesey's novel, OneFlew Over the Cuckoo's Nest   the narrator, "Chief" Bromden suffers from schizophrenia. Since his telling of events includes people growing or shrinking, wallsoozing with slime, and other bizarre events, the reader quickly recognises thatthis story teller is not to be trusted. In Sebastian Faulks'  Engleby , the narrator, Mike Engleby, leadsthe reader to believe a version of events that's increasingly at odds withreality.