While we encounter many notorious liars in literature, we may not even realise that the deception has sometimes taken root within the narrators themselves. As readers, it is natural for us to trust the narrators of the stories we read. Therefore, identifying unreliability is not always intended to be easy and may even be utilised purposefully by the author.

That’s not to say that lying isn’t often obvious in many popular texts. Take Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello, for example. Throughout the whole play, the audience is aware that Iago is weaving lies whereas the other characters do not, often falling victim to his manipulations. This is because lying takes place in verbal communication through the act of violating, meaning that the quality of contribution to the conversation has been jeopardised by the speaker without their interlocutor noticing. The use of recurring utterances of other characters such as ‘honest Iago’ makes it clear that his deception is successful. It is important that this is communicated to the audience as it is Iago’s evil motives that drive forward the understanding of the play and subsequent tragedy.

This is very different for unreliable narrators who are, for the most part, very subtly constructed by the author to be deceptive. Point of view is one of the most important linguistic considerations when attempting to understand how the unreliable narrator is established. Through first-person narration and third-person close narration, the reader sees the world through the consciousness of the narrator and subsequently, their subjective world.

One of the most well-known, yet not strikingly obvious, unreliable narrators is Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby. As a first-person narrator, the reader experiences the world of the novel through Nick’s eyes. In this case, we are dealing with a narrator who is full of contradictions and is easily influenced by those around him. For instance, when Nick first attends one of Gatsby’s parties, he is enchanted by what he witnesses and feels a certain admiration for Gatsby himself. However, when he attends another one of Gatsby’s parties with his cousin, Daisy, he is struck by the artificial nature of the events, just as Daisy herself is. This prompts us to question whether we can trust Nick’s psychological and ideological perception of the events. Is Daisy really the bad guy? Or is Nick too enamoured by Gatsby to be able to think any differently? In this case, it is unclear whether F. Scott Fitzgerald is making Nick unreliable to represent an interior message or if this is a characteristic associated with Nick’s personality idiosyncrasies. 

It’s times like this when I greatly admire authors and their ability to channel a mind, or multiple, in order to immerse the reader within the story, to leave them enchanted by flawed characters, clueless to the real messages creeping beneath the surface. Maybe next time you read a book, you’ll outwit the author. Just take a second to consider–am I being lied to?