Novels sometimes use unreliable narrators

Classic novels like "The Great Gatsby," "Passing," and "Heart of Darkness" are told from characters' limited perspectives, inviting readers to consider how that narrator might be intentionally or unintentionally crafting the story in a particular way.

After Gay Talese’s 2016 book on Gerald Foos was found to lack factual accuracy, criticism of New Journalism returned to the limelight. Some believe the narrative focus requires abandoning the facts and leaves too much room for writers to make up material rather than present what actually happened.

Austen's books are narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, which was not new for her time. Austen, however, helped popularize a little-used technique called "free indirect discourse," in which the narrator took on the style and voice of the character being described without drifting into the first-person perspective. It's a technique still often used by novelists today.

Modernist writers in the early 20th century sought to capture the complexities of the human mind in their fiction. Novelists like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and William Faulkner experimented with the form by using unconventional approaches to narrative, time, and structure. This lecture from Dr. Madeleine Davies from the University of Reading explains how modernists revolutionized fiction, using Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” as a primary example.

Although autofiction, a literary genre blending autobiography and fiction, has been around for millennia, it has become a popular mode in the 21st century. This extensive study of the genre—which analyzes works by Megan Boyle, Tao Lin, and others—argues that the form has become more prevalent because it mirrors the defining technology of the times: social media.

According to one professor, readers return to Shakespeare's plays, not for his storylines, but to learn how things unfold. In the process, they often use his plays to understand why humans act the way they do.

In this brief interview, Terry Castle, an English professor at Stanford, explains the origins of the early British novel. Castle details how the novel was produced for a newly literate middle class interested in recognizable characters and stories “about life as they knew it” rather than Greek and Roman myths or medieval romances. She also explains why a newly enfranchised female demographic was attracted to the fiction of writers like Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

Noteworthy American novels like Toni Morrison’s "Beloved" tell us how spirits help deliver information and greater truths unknown to the characters. Wondering about our souls is common in literature, and the phantoms in these tales offer a unique way of contemplating the complicated experience of being human.

The writer and philosopher Jonathan Rée notes that part of the reason why the book was so popular was that it was an easy pick for students learning French to translate. What's often lost in translation, though, is that the book's narrator, Meursault, who murders a man, is not intended to be a role model.

Wolfe explains the style came from journalists attempting to make fact-based reporting read like a novel, arguing that traditional reporting left readers “bored to tears.” Instead of emphasizing an objective point of view, Wolfe favored detailed descriptions that established complex characters, painted interesting scenes, and shared dialogue.

In 2025, readers discovered AI prompts in three writers' texts, with one even instructing the AI bot to make a passage sound more like another romance writer. This Futurism piece digs into the scandals and how it's contributed to readers' skepticism about the genre's more prolific writers.

Novels are often characterized as a form of cultural escape, but psychologists argue there are health benefits to the many elements comprising fiction. The Greek philosopher Aristotle explored this in his "Poetics," asking if literature was something meant to make us happier. This article highlights eight different innovations common to literature that provide psychological benefits, including the plot twist and more.

The question of what counts as the "first novel" doesn't have a simple answer. This explainer looks at early contenders—from ancient Roman satire to Japan's "Tale of Genji"—and how different cultures shaped the rise of long-form fiction.

“I don't think it was new, and I don’t think it was journalism,” he said. He instead viewed what he and other writers were doing as defining reality using a storytelling technique. In other words, storytelling that wasn’t fiction.

Michael J. Arlen wrote a critique of the then-fashionable and popular form for The Atlantic in 1972, warning about the risk of emphasizing a writer’s perspective over facts. While Arlen applauded the innovation of the style, he believed focusing on voice and perspective could be irresponsible.

Before social media, information was more scarce, and it was the norm not to know much about some controversy or episode. This led to a common prejudice: the availability bias, that what is at hand must be true (in business, the courts, finance, and many fields). With information overload today, the inverse occurs: when something is missing (like the photo of a suspect), it makes us think the suspect does not exist.

- Author Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Ever since the rise of “prestige television” in the early 2000s, critics and viewers alike have argued that TV has replaced the novel by becoming the most significant storytelling medium, citing the cultural importance of shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” and “Succession.” This essay notes that streaming has strengthened that argument, turning episodes into chapters, and explains why this has been bad for storytelling in both forms.

The nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood" influenced true crime's narrative and investigative bend and was supposedly only 92% accurate. Journalist Ben Yagoda reflects on its accuracy after finding the fact-checking file for the four-part series published before the story was converted into hardback. Yagoda says the inaccuracies are "especially striking" because the story was originally published in one of the magazines credited with establishing fact-checking as a practice.

In fantasy, anything is possible, mirroring the supernatural worlds of history’s earliest stories. The narrative voice of fantasy is often similar to early tales, too, with an affinity for the magisterial rather than the contemporary.

Humans are hardwired to make mental mistakes called cognitive biases, affecting the way we view our world. Among the most common are confirmation bias (seeking only evidence that affirms your views), authority bias (overweighting things said by authority figures), groupthink (assimilating ideas to avoid conflict), and more. This quick chart gives an overview of some of the most notable ways we mislead ourselves.

While a trustee is supposed to be a neutral third party whom the grantor appoints to manage their trust, they can be (and often are) the same person as the beneficiary. While that seems counterintuitive, trustees have a legal obligation to manage assets impartially and in the trust’s best interest.

Ever the ironist, Twain claimed to have “ no liking for novels or stories.” Obviously, that was untrue: He read widely, devouring books by Charles Dickens, slave narratives, and texts on astronomy. He also loved John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which he called “something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

The addiction book became a huge success after being added to Oprah Winfrey's book club. After it was revealed to be fiction in 2005, Oprah invited Frey on her show and criticized him for deceiving her and his readers.

Postmodernism describes the cultural movement following World War II, which found artists and thinkers responding to the horrors of the war by challenging the conventional narratives they believed allowed for it. In literature, postmodernist writers played with genre, gallows humor, and intertextuality, interrogating the form itself.

Fantasy is a literary genre that embraces supernatural and magical elements. While the stories often follow common narrative archetypes, like a quest, they frequently take place in elaborately constructed worlds, which sometimes have their own complex physics, lifeforms, and societies.

Some, like Butler, regretted writing predictable, trope-heavy books. Others, like King and Burgess, regretted that what they'd intended as satire had been misunderstood as endorsements.

Kurt Vonnegut is among the most popular postmodernists, renowned for his humor and willingness to move between genres. This clip from a lecture on narrative is a perfect example of those tendencies, with Vonnegut diagramming typical story structures only to mock their predictability. It's not only an enlightening look at the way stories are told—it's also just good comedy.

One subgenre of fan fiction is called "self-insert." It's exactly as it sounds: The form takes a preexisting story and inserts a reader proxy into the world of the story, acting as a form of wish-fulfillment.

There's plenty of news on TikTok, but that doesn't mean it's all reliable. This guide, written by a communication technology professor, breaks down the ways the app's algorithm delivers news. It also covers how users can determine whether or not a story is factual or misleading. Most strikingly, the professor warns readers that if they didn't search for a TikTok video, then "it probably found you."

All literary genres use tropes, a word used to describe established plot devices, character types, and themes. Horror has many of them, like the "Creepy Child" and the "Evil Mask." Some are based on folklore, like the "Deal with the Devil."

Outsiders are often confused by wrestling fans’ emotional investment in predetermined matches. After all, how can you be invested in a scripted sport? That question misses a key component of fans' love for pro wrestling. They suspend their disbelief in the same way that readers of novels do.

Jane Austen is often credited with pioneering the narrative technique of "free indirect discourse," in which a narrator embodies a character's style without using the first-person perspective. But this essay argues Burney is the real innovator and that Austen, a fan of Burney's, continued using the technique to more acclaim.

It might sound like a cliché, but fiction really can make you a better person, objectively speaking. Numerous studies have proven that reading fiction, especially novels, can enhance empathy by exposing people to multiple perspectives and experiences.

Polygraph tests, also known as lie detectors, are better at detecting lies than people, but they still aren't allowed in most courtrooms. That's in part because of mixed signals. For example, spikes in heart rate can be explained by the stress a person feels during interrogation rather than by their own deception. As a result, polygraph tests are prone to false accusations. Results are also unreliable when participants actually believe their lies, examiners have biases, and tricks are employed to help test-takers relax.

Some may describe Gonzo as a more daring style of subjective reporting than New Journalism, as it prioritizes the personal experience and opinions of the writer. Gonzo pieces also tend to feature hyperbole, comedy and taboo subjects.

Calling something “Shakespearean” often denotes a high-quality work of art or a story that recalls one of the Bard’s plays.

Journalist Evan Ratliff became the object of his own story: He opted to clone his voice, feed it into an AI chatbot, and have it do the talking. What could seem like a fun experiment ended up revealing just how far the capacity of artificial intelligence can go in imitating our identities. Hear the ins and outs of how Ratliff achieved this in this fun and thought-provoking episode.

Unlike a journal article, which may be reviewed by up to three people before publication, popular Wikipedia pages may be reviewed thousands of times by editors, potentially enhancing their reliability. Less reviewed articles still require reliable third-party sources and remain subject to verification by bots and administrators who can undo edits.

- Author Malcolm Gladwell (1963 - present)

Journalist Ali Velshi analyzes the lasting appeal of Lois Lowry's "The Giver" and George Orwell's "1984," two dystopian novels that have courted controversy since their publications. Beyond his interpretations, though, Velshi wants to understand why school boards perennially ban these books—and what makes them so fascinating for adolescent readers. In his search, he talks to Lowry about the lasting influence of her novel and to Orwell expert James McCallister about the prescient political portrait in "1984."

Satirists often embody a character to mock the kind of person who would believe what they argue are ridiculous ideas. One famous example was Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report,” who satirized right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly through a bombastic persona. When O’Reilly asked whether that meant he was owed money, Colbert responded with more satire: “There’s a difference between imitation and emulation … If you imitate someone, you owe them a royalty check. If you emulate them, you don’t.”

The writer's final complete novel is a series of dramatic monologues from Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who tries to explain to a stranger the sound of laughter that began following him. As the "Philosophize This!" podcast argues, the book is Camus' attempt at wrestling with some of the thornier aspects of existentialism in a form that's more digestible than a dense philosophical tome.

Camus' book's themes—alienation, transgression, and existentialism—continue to resonate with adolescent reader. That's also true of other popular teenage touchstones, like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," and Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," which are still widely read—and assigned by high school teachers.

Figures from both ends of the political spectrum have claimed Orwell's novella as their own, sometimes ignoring inconvenient aspects of the plot or details of Orwell's biography. This analysis of those political reactions explores why the text is so malleable.

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell argues that language is the primary tool of political control and is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The essay warns readers that how they use and consume language will dictate what they permit—or prohibit—in society.