Reimagining Narrative Voices: Unreliable Narrators in 21st-Century Fiction

Abstract

In contemporary fiction, unreliable narrators remain a dominant trope that informs narrative structures and reader engagement strategies. From their original instantiation in literary greats to their ubiquitous presence in literary landscapes of the 21st century, the author tracks the evolution of the unreliable narrator. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Life of Pi by Yann Martel—today’s literature relies heavily on unreliable narrators, which this paper will analyze. This is a close examination of how modern authors use unreliable narrators to create suspense and depth in their stories. The unreliable narrator is a mechanism of sorts, playing with social and political issues while challenging readers to consider what truth is and how much one can trust perception. A narrative technique analysis shows that reader participation in meaning-making changes from passive consumption to active interpretation through unreliable narration. The paper explores how unreliable narrators continue to grow their relevance to contemporary literature and examines their potential desire to remain in the spotlight of literary debates for the foreseeable future.