Let me tell you a story

September 10, 2006 1:55 PM

Examples of movies, books, where the narrator lies to the audience as they tell their story?

"The Usual Suspects" prompted me to wonder if this is one of the things that made this such an original and outstanding piece of writing. Almost the entire story is a work of calculated fiction by the storyteller, himself a character within it. Upon conclusion, it falls upon the audience to decipher and assemble what is true and what isn't.

Any other works you can think of where intentional deception by the narrator of the story is aimed at not only other characters, but at the audience?

posted by scallion to Media & Arts (63 answers total)

The narrator in The Remains of the Day isn't honest with himself or his audience (I'm thinking of the book, not the movie). It's nothing as spectacular as The Usual Suspects, but I think it fits the bill.
posted by agropyron at 1:58 PM on September 10, 2006

Lolita is considered a pretty classical example of the unreliable narrator.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 2:03 PM on September 10, 2006

That's a specific type of Unreliable narrator. That page covers the Usual Suspects, and plenty more.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 2:03 PM on September 10, 2006 [1 favorite]

"Election" does this, both in the book and the movie.
posted by interrobang at 2:03 PM on September 10, 2006

The narrator in THe Opposite of Sex doesn't really lie, per se, but she does mislead, manipulate and misdirect the audience throughout the movie
posted by lekvar at 2:03 PM on September 10, 2006

Wikipedia has a fairly exhaustive entry on Unreliable Narrators. I'm fond of the device of the first person narrator who is actually lying to himself, but is so transparent as to convey the true state of affairs to the reader.
posted by Manjusri at 2:09 PM on September 10, 2006

Stark, the narrator and main character in Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward, lies to the audience about quite a few bits of his personal history. It's not left to the reader to figure it out in this case, though - he admits to lying and tells what he claims is the truth later on in the book.
posted by terpsichoria at 2:09 PM on September 10, 2006

That's a specific type of Unreliable narrator.

There are a lot of items on the Wiki list that don't seem to fit, IM(non-expert)O.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 2:11 PM on September 10, 2006

Other stuff by Nabokov as well; I haven't read much but Pale Fire certainly fits your bill.
posted by louigi at 2:13 PM on September 10, 2006

I thought the Denzel Washington movie Fallen had a really unique take on an unreliable narrator. "Let me tell you about the time I almost died..."
posted by frogan at 2:16 PM on September 10, 2006

Radio Flyer was another good one, in the idea where the story being told ends up to not be real.

Oh, and don't forget Kurosawa's Rashomon, and it's various retellings (e.g. Courage Under Fire), where the same event is told from multiple perspectives.
posted by frogan at 2:20 PM on September 10, 2006

I read it quickly, but I'm pretty sure that was going on in that Eggers book, You Shall Know Our Velocity.
posted by loquax at 2:22 PM on September 10, 2006

There is always Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd".
posted by advil at 2:27 PM on September 10, 2006 [2 favorites]

I remember that when I read reviews of The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips, the reviewers compared it to Pale Fire for its unreliable narrator.
posted by anjamu at 2:29 PM on September 10, 2006

Henry James' "The Aspern Papers."
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:34 PM on September 10, 2006

Frailty starring Bill Paxton and Matthew McConaughey.
posted by yeti at 2:35 PM on September 10, 2006

loquax is right, there are a few juicy lies from the narrator to the reader in You Shall Know our Velocity by dave eggers.
posted by amethysts at 2:36 PM on September 10, 2006

The Game starring Michael Douglas. [I think this counts].
posted by yeti at 2:36 PM on September 10, 2006

Life of Pi written by Yann Martel. The ending provides for two explanations: one a literal truth as described in the novel, and a second alternative interpretation.
posted by yeti at 2:41 PM on September 10, 2006

I read it quickly, but I'm pretty sure that was going on in that Eggers book, You Shall Know Our Velocity.

It's somewhat suggested in the original version, but it's made explicit in the paperback (which leads to an entirely different discussion).


The Turn of the Screw by Henry James certainly could be an example of this, but the uncertainty is part of the appeal.
posted by kyleg at 2:45 PM on September 10, 2006

Seconding frogan, Rashomon is about as rigorous an analysis of the whole objective vs. subjective reality thing that you're likely to see that also has swords in it.

Sunset Boulevard is kind of a classic since you learn from the outset that the narrator's dead. Film noir is full of examples, but Detour is the must see of the genre - the dissonance between the on-screen reality of the protagonist and that which is perceived by the other characters in the film is what drives the whole plot.
posted by peptide at 2:50 PM on September 10, 2006

Cather's My Antonia can be read as narrator Jim Burden's largely self-deceiving revision of personal history.
posted by thinman at 2:51 PM on September 10, 2006

I learned in 11th grade English that The Red Badge of Courage is an early example of an unreliable narrator (not when it comes to specific events, per se, but in regards to other narrative devices). I think Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye is another famous literary example.
posted by muddgirl at 2:55 PM on September 10, 2006

Cather's My Antonia can be read as narrator Jim Burden's largely self-deceiving revision of personal history.

Please elaborate. When our book group read this book, nobody came close to considering the narrator unreliable. Is this a common approach to My Antonia? Or is this just a generalization that could be made about any first-person novel?
posted by jdroth at 3:00 PM on September 10, 2006

advil: Does the narrator of "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" actually explicitly lie, though?
posted by matthewr at 3:00 PM on September 10, 2006

From wikipedia: Dr. Sheppard's (and Christie's) contention was that everything he had written had been the truth; he simply had not written the whole truth. In particular, he did not mention what happened between twenty and ten minutes to nine, the time at which he was in fact murdering Roger Ackroyd.
posted by matthewr at 3:04 PM on September 10, 2006

You're very right -- it is all the literal truth. But there is certainly "intentional deception by the narrator", so I figured it might qualify.
posted by advil at 3:09 PM on September 10, 2006

Robert Bloch's short story, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper."
posted by kirkaracha at 3:12 PM on September 10, 2006

The narrator in The Debt to Pleasure is rather unreliable, and if I recall correctly, does deliberately lie.
posted by naturesgreatestmiracle at 3:13 PM on September 10, 2006

A really fine movie where this occurs---and the clues are subtle---is Stephen Soderbergh's King of the Hill.

Not exactly lying, but the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink is pretty clearly a dream/nightmare being experienced by an adolescent boy on a hot summer night in a tenement on the Lower East Side of NYC.
posted by LeisureGuy at 3:20 PM on September 10, 2006

Science fiction and fantasy has many good examples, as SF readers tend to like being surprised in clever ways. Off the top of my head:

Emma Bull's Bone Dance has a wonderful example. It's not quite intentional, but the main character has an absolute whopper of a secret that is concealed for most of the book by the narrative viewpoint Bull has chosen. For a total spoiler click here.

As the Wikipedia page notes, Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons also has a doozy.
posted by kindall at 3:36 PM on September 10, 2006

Oh, totally forgot the Stephen King short story, "Strawberry Spring," which is being made into a movie.
posted by frogan at 3:44 PM on September 10, 2006

Peter Carey's Illywhacker is told by a self-confessed liar (cue paradox).
posted by thomas j wise at 3:46 PM on September 10, 2006

Tim Burton's Big Fish plays all over the unreliable narrator device.
posted by paulsc at 4:00 PM on September 10, 2006

Memento
posted by The Deej at 4:15 PM on September 10, 2006

Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin is a great example a deceptive narrator, although I'm pretty certain that I've just completely spoiled the book by mentioning it in this thread.
posted by chrismear at 4:20 PM on September 10, 2006

Moll Flanders - or, as I should rather say, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums. - is an early example of a not quite reliable narrator. For one thing, there's a good question of how penitent she is.
posted by jb at 4:20 PM on September 10, 2006

Goldman in The Princess Bride. The entire backstory about the book and his family is bogus.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 4:22 PM on September 10, 2006

The unnamed protagonist of Xhang Yimou's Hero is an unreliable narrator.

Kevin Spacey's character in K-Pax is also fairly unreliable, but I don't know if I'd consider that intentional.
posted by metabrilliant at 4:57 PM on September 10, 2006

jdroth writes: Please elaborate. When our book group read this book, nobody came close to considering the narrator unreliable. Is this a common approach to My Antonia? Or is this just a generalization that could be made about any first-person novel?

I'll respond by email, rather than subject everyone to a long reply that doesn't do much to answer the OP's question.
posted by thinman at 5:06 PM on September 10, 2006

Chiming in to suggest another Nabokov work (with, IIRC, a whole deceptive chapter, and then some pages describing this type of literary device):
Despair.
posted by ktrey at 5:18 PM on September 10, 2006

It may be somewhat tangential, but ktrey's comment reminded me of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which directly addresses the unreliability of the author and the reader's complicity in creating meaning from a text.
posted by metabrilliant at 5:36 PM on September 10, 2006

Also, Dennis Potter works this line of country pretty thoroughly. For example, Track 29.
posted by LeisureGuy at 6:05 PM on September 10, 2006

As I was reading others' responses I kept thinking about Blade Runner, with the oft-implied device that Deckard is himself a replicant and isn't aware of that fact. Not so much a deliberate deception on the part of the narrator, but certainly adds a different dimension to the story.
posted by planetthoughtful at 6:27 PM on September 10, 2006

Fight Club, sort of, although there, the narrator is as fooled as the reader/viewer.
posted by 4ster at 6:31 PM on September 10, 2006

where the narrator lies to the audience as they tell their story?

F For Fake not only does this, but is about lying as well. highly recommended.
posted by carsonb at 7:31 PM on September 10, 2006

The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler.
posted by xo at 7:37 PM on September 10, 2006

Interestingly, both The Life of Pi and Calvin and Hobbes feature tigers prominently.
posted by riotgrrl69 at 7:50 PM on September 10, 2006

"the hole" which is a flick with thora birch, embeth davidz and keira knightly. the audience does learn the truth of it, eventually.
posted by crush-onastick at 8:38 PM on September 10, 2006

Not exactly lying, but the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink is pretty clearly a dream/nightmare being experienced by an adolescent boy on a hot summer night in a tenement on the Lower East Side of NYC.

Thanks for the laugh!
posted by dobbs at 9:05 PM on September 10, 2006

From the Wikipedia list, incidentally, McEwan's Atonement fills scallion's bill particularly nicely, in the sense that it's not just an instance of the unreliable narrator, but it centers on a fiction whose author is in the story itself -- and we only learn the identity of the author of fiction, its purpose and the nature of its divergence from what really happened, in the book's closing pages. In that sense, it's particularly like The Usual Suspects, though of course very different in other ways. Importantly, it's not told in first person, which adds to the effectiveness of the device.

Life of Pi has a similar conclusion, though its retroactive effect on the text is different, because Pi's story seems to be something of a "tall tale" all the way through, and he tells it directly.

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun does this kind of thing in a huge way, and you feel you need to re-read the whole thing in the light of the revelations that start to come together in the close of the narrative. However, Wolfe leaves clues in all parts of the book, so the "real story" is something that is shadowed all through, and just becomes more pronounced toward the end.

This kind of end-of-the-book unveiling is somewhat (in my view) distinct from the instance of the unreliable narrator of the Great Gatsby type, whom we come to suspect in a kind of general and emotional way -- his portrayal of the central drama is refracted, perhaps radically, so that we can't know precisely how far his rendering of the situation is from the "real" truth. This is true of any sophisticated fiction involving first-person narration, of course, but the books discussed in this thread on the whole are ones that play heavily on this idea.
posted by BT at 9:15 PM on September 10, 2006

Response by poster: Fantastic stuff. Thanks everyone. I had no idea of the Unreliable Narrator as a device, let alone a Wikipedia entry. Of course, though, then I wouldn't have garnered all the fantastic suggestions and points in the right direction from the collective. Wooo.
posted by scallion at 11:54 PM on September 10, 2006

The Descent fits the unreliable narrator categorisation in an unusual way.

Martin Amis' novel 'Success' has a hopelessly self deluding central character.
posted by biffa at 1:51 AM on September 11, 2006

Roger Zelazny's Amber novels.
posted by ursus_comiter at 4:56 AM on September 11, 2006

graham greene The Quiet American, pretty well
posted by londongeezer at 5:09 AM on September 11, 2006

Pale Fire certainly fits your bill

The narrator is more delusionary than deliberately untruthtelling, surely?
posted by IndigoJones at 5:41 AM on September 11, 2006

It reminds me of an episode of The X-Files, "Bad Blood," where Mulder and Scully both tell their sides of a story to each other. (It's unforunately one of their "comical" episodes, but one of the better ones at least.)
posted by itchie at 6:26 AM on September 11, 2006

I know you're only asking about films, but the narration in the book The Insult really messed with my head.
posted by skryche at 6:47 AM on September 11, 2006

The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson
posted by thenextword at 10:35 AM on September 11, 2006

Inivisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk definitely lies to you.
posted by skrike at 1:12 PM on September 11, 2006

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story called "Youth" (beware of spoilers), in which the third-person narrator neglects to mention a rather major aspect of the characters until the last few paragraphs.
posted by vorfeed at 1:15 PM on September 11, 2006

In the Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing", the narrator's voice-over version of events conflicts with the events depicted on the screen. This also happens, although less frequently, in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon."
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 3:26 PM on September 11, 2006

I can vividly remember my first encounter with the idea of the 'unreliable narrator'. I was 13, and our English teacher had given us Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male to read. (That's the novel where the narrator tries and fails to kill Hitler, and is then pursued by Nazi secret agents seeking revenge .. great stuff for a 13-year-old!) In the class discussion, our teacher gradually helped us to realise that the mainspring of the novel lay not in the plot, but in the character. The narrator lies to himself (and the reader) about his reasons for wanting to kill Hitler, and it's only when he starts to be honest with himself that he finds the inner strength he needs to turn the tables on his pursuers. (Do read it; it's a great novel.) It came as a revelation to me; I can remember thinking 'so this is what novels are all about'; and I've loved fiction ever since.

Nowadays, of course, you can hardly open a novel without tripping over an unreliable narrator, and there is a particular genre of novels narrated by extravagantly unreliable narrators (William Boyd's The New Confessions, Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake) which, frankly, bores me to tears. So, you want to show me how all storytellers are liars, and how the boundaries between truth and fiction are inherently unstable? Oooh, how daring, how tricksily postmodern, ENOUGH WITH THE NARRATIVE TRICKS JUST TELL THE FUCKING STORY OKAY?

Okay, rant over, here are some of my favourite novels with unreliable narrators:

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone. This is a classic Victorian detective story with multiple narrators, where the main character, whose adventures we follow and whose voice we learn to trust, turns out to be the one who .. but I mustn't give the ending away. (The same trick is turned in Michael Innes's Lament for a Maker, one of the classics of Golden Age detective fiction.)

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw. Another classic, where it is possible to read the story in two entirely different ways, depending on whether you think the narrator is mad or sane. (Geoffrey Household, whose Rogue Male I mentioned above, has a version of The Turn of the Screw in his novel Dance of the Dwarfs, where again it is possible to 'flip' between two different interpretations.

(to be continued ..)
posted by verstegan at 4:38 AM on September 18, 2006