Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators

Why do we fail to trust some narrators, and why do the tales other narrators tell strike us as incomplete? How do the phenomena of untrustworthy and fallible narra tion function within fictional texts, and how do readers respond to these kinds of nar ration? In this essay I will address these questions by reviewing Wayne Booth's introduction of the term unreliable narrator and his explication of unreliable narra tion as a function of irony, since this formulation remains the leading model for un reliable narration. I will then describe how Booth's text-immanent model of narrator