Unreliable Narrator Examples in Short Stories: 6 Voices You Cannot Trust
Quick answer: Unreliable narrator examples from Poe, Gilman, Maupassant, Gogol, Saki and Bierce, with notes on how each story lets the reader see past the voice telling it.
An unreliable narrator is a storyteller whose account the reader learns not to take at face value, whether because they are lying, mad, naive or simply too close to events to see them. The device works only if the story gives the reader a way to measure the gap: a detail the narrator misreads, a contradiction, another character's reaction. Without that measure there is no unreliability, only a narrator.
Six voices you cannot trust
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe begins with the narrator insisting on his sanity and offering the calm with which he tells the story as proof. The calm lasts a paragraph. His account of hearing the dead man's heart through the floorboards while policemen chat is precise, confident and impossible, and the precision is what convicts him.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a journal kept by a woman who reports her husband's kindness, her own improvement and the wallpaper's behaviour with equal steadiness. The reader watches the proportions shift entry by entry until she is crawling round the room. She never says she is ill; the paper says it for her.
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant is a diary of a man who becomes convinced an invisible being is drinking his water and stealing his will. Maupassant gives the narrator experiments, dates and a rational tone, and leaves the reader unable to decide whether the Horla exists or the diarist is dissolving.
Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol follows the clerk Poprishchin from office resentment to reading letters written by dogs to declaring himself King of Spain. The dates at the top of each entry disintegrate along with him, and the comedy turns into something else in the final lines about his mother.
The Open Window by Saki hands the narration of a tragedy to fifteen-year-old Vera, who tells the nervous visitor that her aunt's husband and brothers died in a bog three years ago and that the aunt keeps the window open awaiting their return. Every word is invented on the spot. The reader learns this exactly when Framton does.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce uses a third-person narrator who follows Peyton Farquhar's escape so faithfully that the reader takes the swim, the forest and the walk home as fact. The narration is not lying; it is reporting a dying mind. The last sentence corrects the record.
How to use it in your own story
Unreliability is built from evidence the narrator does not know they are giving. Plan what the truth is, then decide which details will leak it.
Common mistakes
The first fault is the narrator who is simply wrong about everything, which gives the reader nothing to hold and makes the story unreadable rather than intriguing. The second is the late confession, where the narrator announces their unreliability in the final paragraph instead of letting the reader discover it. The third is inconsistency mistaken for unreliability: a narrator who knows things they could not know because the author forgot the viewpoint.
Where readers meet it today
Readers today meet the device in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and, in short form, in Ryunosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove.
What writers can take from this
- Know the truth before you write the lie.
- Let the narrator give themselves away through detail, never through announcement.
- Consistency of voice is what makes the unreliability legible.
- One other character's reaction can calibrate the reader faster than any hint in narration.
- Decide early whether the reader will ever be told the truth, and do not hedge.
Try it yourself
Write a 600-word story in the form of a reference letter recommending someone for a job. By the end the reader should understand that the writer is describing themselves, and that they should not be hired.
Questions
What is an example of an unreliable narrator in a short story?
The narrator of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, who insists he is sane and then describes hearing a dead man's heartbeat through the floor while police officers chat in the room. His confidence is the evidence against him.
How do you identify an unreliable narrator?
Look for a gap between what the narrator reports and what other details in the story show: a contradiction in facts, a reaction from another character that does not fit, a confidence that outruns the evidence.
Can a third-person narrator be unreliable?
Yes, when the narration is bound to one character's perception. Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is told in third person, and its long escape sequence turns out to be a dying man's fantasy.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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