By Ariell Cacciola

Unreliable narrators run rampant throughout literature, compelling us toward them and their often-twisted tales even as we question every word and action. To me, they are the most fascinating of narrators. Note that their unreliability might not be obvious at first, like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes their reliability is suspect from the onset. Take the unnamed narrator in It Happened in Boston?,who,bent on meeting God so he can destroy him, has as the opening lines, “Lately I have come to feel that the pigeons are spying on me. What other explanation can there be?”

The reasons for telling a story through the eyes of an unreliable narrator include introducing a twist in the plot, re-evaluating the point of view, suggesting mental stability, and exposing bias, among a limitless number of other reasons.

The most utilized unreliable narrators are those that purposefully…