How Unreliable Narrators Force the Reader to Read Twice

Near the end of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens, who has spent three hundred pages defending his life of dignified service, sits on a pier and weeps. The weeping is not what surprises us. What surprises us is that we already knew. Somewhere around page eighty, when Stevens described his father's death and immediately changed the subject to the quality of the silver polish, a small alarm went off, and we have been reading two books ever since: the one Stevens is telling us, and the one he cannot bring himself to tell.

This is the work an unreliable narrator does. The term, coined by Wayne Booth in 1961, names a narrator whose account the reader has reason to distrust — not because the narrator is lying outrightly, necessarily, but because the text itself supplies evidence the narrator's version cannot accommodate. Booth's key move was to distinguish the narrator from the implied author, the shaping intelligence behind the book. When those two voices diverge, the reader is recruited as a third party. We are asked to hold the narrator's testimony in one hand and the implied author's quieter testimony in the other, and to notice the gap.

That noticing is what forces the second reading. On a first pass through Lolita, Humbert Humbert's lush, self-pitying prose carries us along; on a second pass, every endearment toward Dolores reads as evidence in a case the narrator did not know he was making. The book has not changed. We have been given the trick of reading against the voice. Nabokov plants the evidence on the first page — Humbert's audience is a jury — but the device only activates once we accept that the storyteller is also the defendant.

Unreliability comes in several varieties, and they ask different things of us. The narrator may be unreliable about facts: a child too young to interpret what they see, a madman whose perceptions slip, a memoirist whose memory is reconstructive rather than retrieved. The narrator may be unreliable about values: a Stevens who calls servility dignity, a Humbert who calls predation love. The narrator may be unreliable about themselves: a self-image so defended that the reader can see around it, as we see around the unnamed governess in The Turn of the Screw, where the question of whether the ghosts are real is inseparable from the question of what the governess needs them to be. These categories are not airtight — many narrators are unreliable in more than one way — but distinguishing them helps us name what, exactly, we are reading against.

The device only works if the text provides the counter-evidence. A narrator who simply lies, with no signals to contradict the lie, produces not unreliability but deception, and the reader cannot read twice because there is nothing to read against. The craft lies in the planting: the detail the narrator mentions and dismisses, the reaction from another character that the narrator misreads, the metaphor that says more than the narrator intended. Ishiguro is a master of the telling aside; James of the suggestive ambiguity; Nabokov of the prose that grows more beautiful exactly where it should grow more ashamed. Each writer trains the reader to listen for a second frequency.

Which is why these books reward — sometimes require — being read again. The first reading is the seduction; the second is the case. On the first pass we are inside the narrator's voice, taking the world on the narrator's terms. On the second, we know where the gaps are, and we read for the shape of what the narrator has been organizing the story to avoid. The double reading is not a bonus feature of these novels. It is what they are for. They take the ordinary act of trusting a storyteller and turn it into the material of the book itself, so that by the end we have learned something not only about Stevens or Humbert or the governess, but about the credulity we brought to them.