The George Costanza Rule of Unreliable Narrators

Let us pause for a moment and consider the joy and genius of the Unreliable Narrator, a literary trick that offers a way to forgive a multitude of sins. Plot makes no sense? Character inconsistent? He’s unreliable, natch!

I kid, of course (mostly). The Unreliable Narrator is a super weapon when writing a story, because when handled well it offers the chance to truly surprise and shock your readers. Handling it well isn’t always easy, though, especially when you’ve got a first-person narrator. Making a first-person POV unreliable is so challenging some newbie writers wonder out loud if it’s even possible, and you’re forced to direct their attention to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Fight Club with a sad shake of the head.

Writing an unreliable first-person narrator is challenging, but it’s not that hard. You just have to remember George Costanza’s advice to Jerry on the subject of lying: It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true.

This is Fine

The key to an unreliable narrator is that they have to be simultaneously aware of their own chicanery and yet unaware of it. If you think about it, we’ve all elided a few white lies or poor decisions from our personal recollections, we’ve all convinced ourselves that something was fine when it clearly wasn’t. Whether it was a relative benign self-deception like convincing yourself a certain job was okay even when it was stressing you out or something meatier like telling yourself that a romance was fine even though you were miserable, we’ve all lied to ourselves. On some level we know we’re lying, but it’s not always a conscious level.

That’s how an unreliable narrator works. They keep all their self-knowledge buried so they can believe their own lies. And convincing themselves that what they’re thinking—essentially, what they’re saying to the reader—is the key. Your narrator has to believe what they’re thinking. And you know exactly how to do that, because you’ve done it yourself. Don’t deny it. Denying the obvious is a dick move.

Of course, before figuring out how to make an unreliable narrator work, ask yourself if your story is well served by having one in the first place. Just because you can do something cool doesn’t mean it will work, and making your narrator an unreliable jerk only makes sense if it serves your story.

Plot twist: I’ve never seen an episode of Seinfeld.