Prose craft
Unreliable narrator
A narrator who cannot be trusted or whose credibility is compromised; the gap between what is told and what is true drives the story.
An unreliable narrator is "a narrator who cannot be trusted or whose credibility is compromised." Wayne C. Booth coined the term in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), and William Riggan's 1981 typology sorts the classic types: the picaro, teller of self-serving picaresque tales; the clown, from Tristram Shandy to Humbert Humbert; the madman of Poe's narrators; and the naif, like Holden Caulfield, with unreliability ranging "from children to mature characters."
The device runs on point of view: the narration stays internally consistent while its judgments drift, and the reader reconstructs the truth the narrator misreads, as Stevens does in The Remains of the Day, describing events reliably but "interpreting them in an unreliable way." For serial writers the constraint is publish order: clues planted for a later reveal cannot be rebalanced once chapters are live, so a narrator's blind spots need planning up front, like any canon fact.