On Unreliable Narrators and Why I Trust Them More Than I Should

because people who admit they’re lying are often closer to the truth than the ones who think they’re not

I have always had a soft spot for unreliable narrators. The ones who tell you a story with absolute confidence, even though you know they are leaving things out or twisting them to fit a version they can live with. The ones who talk in circles or lie so well they almost believe themselves. The ones who make you second-guess every sentence but keep you reading anyway.

At first, I thought I liked them because they were interesting. They made stories more complicated. More layered. More fun to dissect. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was something deeper. I do not just like unreliable narrators. I relate to them. I understand what it means to tell a story a certain way, not because you want to deceive someone else, but because you are still trying to convince yourself.

We all edit our own narratives. We leave things out. We highlight what makes us look better. We change the order of events until the timeline feels safe. Sometimes it is not even intentional. It is just survival. Sometimes the truth is too sharp to tell plainly, so you wrap it in metaphor and memory and misdirection. That does not make it false. It makes it human.

That is why I never fully trust the narrators who sound too certain. The ones who explain everything like it is a math problem with only one answer. Real life does not work that way. It is messy and biased and emotional. We do not tell our stories objectively. We tell them the way we remember them. The way we want to remember them. The way we need to in order to move forward.

So when I read a book and the narrator is clearly lying to me, I do not feel betrayed. I feel seen. Because sometimes being unreliable is just another word for being honest about the fact that memory is fragile, and perspective changes everything.

We all have moments we do not want to write down as they really happened. We all have chapters we would rather skip. And maybe that is not a flaw. Maybe that is the most honest kind of storytelling there is.