A narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the 'true' understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author. The discrepancy between the unreliable narrator's view of events and the view that readers suspect to be more accurate creates a sense of irony. The term does not necessarily mean that such a narrator is morally untrustworthy or a habitual liar (although this may be true in some cases), since the category also includes harmlessly naive, 'fallible', or ill-informed narrators. A classic case is Huck in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): this fourteen-year-old narrator does not understand the full significance of the events he is relating and commenting on. Other kinds of unreliable narrator seem to be falsifying their accounts from motives of vanity or malice. In either case, the reader is offered the pleasure of picking up 'clues' in the narrative that betray the true state of affairs. This kind of first-person narrative is particularly favoured in 20th-century fiction: a virtuoso display of its use is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), which employs three unreliable narrators---an imbecile, a suicidal student, and an irritable racist bigot. See also point of view.

 from Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
 Baldick, Chris
Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. x, 361 p.
Copyright ¨Ï Chris Baldick 2001, 2004, 2008. Extracted from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, originally published in 2008 as a book by Oxford University Press.