unreliable narrator

Meanings

1. A narrating character or storyteller in a literary or other artistic work (such as a film, novel, play, or song) who provides conflicting, inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise questionable information to the audience or reader.

Etymology

Apparently coined by the U.S. literary critic Wayne Clayson Booth (1921–2005) in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961): see the quotation.