Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. (The narrator starts by claiming that he was once insane, then later says otherwise. Pirsig himself draws attention to this in the preface, in the most recent release of this book.)
Nick, at least once, tells us everything that has happened (I believe this is at a party)- but then tells us that he’s slept through the whole thing.
Quite a bit unreliable.
You beat me to it. In that case…how about ** Surfacing ** by Margaret Atwood?
Or how about a pair of books in third person? The narrators simply report what the characters saw, instead of judging the sanity of those things. ** The Voyeur ** by Alain Robbe-Grillett and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon.
Gene Wolfe has different varieties of unreliable narrators in several of his novels.
In Soldier of the Mists (and its sequel, Soldier of Arete), the narrator is suffering from a mental condition where his short term memories don’t stay as long-term memories. He keeps notes to combat this, but doesn’t always read all of them. As a result, he misses a lot of connections that the reader can make. As if that weren’t enough, his mental condition either makes him hallucinate or able to see the supernatural (depending on your reading), but he does not realize that what he’s seeing is not what everyone else sees.
In his Book of the New Sun series (starting with The Shadow of the Torturer), the narrator has an excellent memory - but as you read on, the occassional contradiction appears, and is obvious enough to be on purpose and give you the idea that the narrator does not always tell you the truth (usually by omitting key details).
Peace and The Fifth Head of Cerberus are two others by him with unreliable narrators who are somewhere between confused and dishonest.
Part of the appeal with Wolfe is that you can easily read the books as having two different explanations, and either one will hold up (mostly) well.
All three of the narrators are unreliable in Yellow Raft in Blue Water–can’t remember the author. Of course, the point is for all three to be unreliable, and the reader is suppoesd to pull the story together him/herself.
Two of the best, and funniest, are Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (and its sequel, Gentlemen Marry Brunettes), and Patrick Dennis’ Little Me.
For short stories, check out The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Rape Fantasies (not nearly as explicit as that sounds) by Margaret Atwood. Very good stuff, both of them.
I’d suggest a couple –
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Frankenstein gets very interesting depending on which edition you have – that 1816 (?) version, or the 1831 edition in which Shelley made significant changes. In one of these editions, towards the end we have Ronald Walton coming in and finding Victor actually adding dialogue to the written account (which is, after all, what the reader is presented with) “for prosterity.” This makes the entire overall narrative fishy; and the Creature’s own first-person narrative can be called into question a number of times.
Also, consider poems–a lot of critical ink has been put onto paper dealing with the relationship between the text of the poem and the marginalia that accompany it–if you read closely, the margin notes don’t always seem to square with what’s going on in the poem.
Which segues into the ultimate account of the unreliable narrator/notator – Nabakov’s Pale Fire!
“An Instance of the Fingerpost” by Iain Pears. A sort of Rashomon like telling of a murder in 1600’s Oxford, England. Told by four narrators from their various perspectives.
Great to see The Good Soldier and [/]The Floating Opera* mentioned. In re the latter, most of Barth’s narrators (if not all) are terribly unreliable.
One of my, say, top 5 favorite books of all time, Par Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, is a GREAT example of an unreliable narrator. The novel is narrated by the court jester of a medieval court. It’s very clear to us, the reader, from the beginning, that he’s a blackhearted sociopath, if not an outright psychopath, but the book he thinks he’s writing is a justification of himself as a paragon of virtue and as a victim of everyone else’s incompetence and venery; the book we’re reading, however, is an appalling account of how one person’s evil energies can bring down an entire Kingdom.
Imagine, if you will, the diaries of Iago.
Oooops – and the poem I was talking about in my post was Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” where you have the poem and then these annotations off in the margins. Coleridge I believe added these annotations later after the poem was first published in Lyrical Ballads, because so many people–including Wordsworth–found the work obscure. So its an interesting question of whether or not Coleridge even seriously intended the marginalia to be an accurate reflection of the poem’s narrative.
Don’t forget Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. At least the movie; I haven’t read the story so I’m only assuming it’s the same first-person narrative style.
First person narrators are inherently unreliable. The question is really one of how unreliable.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison features a character who reports the events fairly accurately, but is a paranoid delusional whose description of the other characters in the story is wildly inaccurate.
The speaker in Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken contradicts himself several times, then tells the reader that he’s going to lie about the choice he’s made. Yet legions of fans interpret the lie at the end as if it were the point of the poem.
A Simple Plan by Scott Smith takes us inside the mind of a serial killer who doesn’t realize that he’s a serial killer, and is, to the end, convinced that he’s just an ordinary guy who got caught up in some extaordinary circumstances.
American Psycho?
Also, quite a number of post-apocalyptic science fiction pieces have unreliable narrators, inawsmuch as the narrator doesn’t understand the nature of the disaster that led to the present state of affairs.
A Canticle for Liebowitz, perhaps?
The Name of the Rose is perhaps another candidate, since the narrator has a medieval understanding of events.
Skammer–THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING is told in the third person. Christopher Plummer’s Kipling character is Huston’s invention.
Thanks for all the good suggestions so far. I did mean to include Rashomon in the OP, but I got ahead of myself.
Keep ‘em comin’, y’all!
Nona, a short story in Stephen King’s collection Skeleton Crew.
The autobiographical account of a man who picked up a hitchhiker who drove him to commit a string of murders during a blizzard. The narration degrades into nonsense towards the end of the story.
“Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp” are as unreliable as any diary by a horny teenage boy, and “Safe as Houses” by Alex Jeffers features an unreliable narrator. The latter book is about the life experiences of a gay, hearing son of deaf parents.