Have You Been Fooled by an Unreliable Narrator?

The popularity of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, now a hit movie, shows that the "unreliable narrator" is still a potent fictional device. The unreliable narrator is a fictional character--sometimes a protagonist, a witness to events or a third-party storyteller--who misleads the narrative audience (and eavesdropping real readers) by outright lies, concealment or omission of information, and misjudgment or misrepresentation, intentional or unintentional, of characters and situations. There have been many famous unreliable narrators in fiction. Children and naifs are naturally chosen for their poor skill at evaluating people and circumstances, a la Huck in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A mentally disturbed narrator creates another type of unreliable voice; consider many Poe stories or Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Characters also mislead to justify or reinvent their actions, like pedophile Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, or the fabulist Pi in Yann Martel's Life of Pi.  There is an obvious utility in mystery writing to an unreliable narrator who can provide clues and red herrings while revealing and obscuring motives, all in order to take the reader the long way through the woods to that surprise turn that reveals the truth. One of the most famous mystery examples of an unreliable narrator is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This year, Sophie Hannah's paranormal mystery The Orphan Choir offers a seemingly unreliable housewife narrator who complains of hearing children singing liturgical music, music that appears to be all in her head--but maybe not. Now if an astute mystery reader wants to avoid being fooled by an unreliable narrator device, there usually are built-in clues. Consider signals such as narrator contradictions, unexplained memory gaps, lies to other characters, and negative reactions or contradicting input by other characters. Be alert when a narrator's story defies common sense, logic, normal experience or probability. But when a mystery is well written, it is probably more enjoyable to take the twists and turns with the unreliable narrator, right to that satisfyingly unexpected ending. For more examples of unreliable narrators in fiction, see http://flavorwire.com/410468/10-of-literatures-most-unreliable-narrators