Listening to Unreliable Narrators

“Unless the poets lie.” Euripides threads this skeptical aside through his tragedies, as though even the chorus cannot quite trust the very story it inhabits. The line is both playful and devastating. It signals an awareness, already in classical Athens, that to live by stories is to be exposed to deception. The gods may be immortal, but their tales are unstable. The poets themselves are suspect.

The anxiety is older still. Hesiod has the Muses boast that they know how to tell lies that sound like truth, and also, when they wish, the truth itself. What can it mean to receive revelation from divine figures who openly claim deceit as part of their arsenal? The implication is unsettling: stories are not reliable conveyors of fact. They are a medium in which truth and falsehood are always entangled.

Thucydides makes the same point in a more austere register. His History of the Peloponnesian War claims to be rigorous, but he concedes that the speeches he records are not transcriptions but reconstructions of what “was called for.” In other words, even history is narrated by a voice that cannot be trusted as literal. At the root of both poetry and history lies the problem of unreliable narration. Plato, seeing the danger, proposes exile. Better banish the poets, he says, than let them shape the soul with lies.

And then there is Camus’s The Fall. Clamence, a successful Parisian lawyer, begins by confessing his hypocrisy in a smoky Amsterdam bar. At first, he seems almost penitential, exposing his pride, his failures, his cowardice. But as the monologue unfolds, the trap is sprung: the confession is not for self-purification but for ensnaring the listener. By disclosing his own fall, he implicates his audience in the same condition. His narration is unreliable not because it conceals, but because it seduces—drawing the reader into a complicity from which there is no neutral escape.

Clamence reveals a deeper truth: listening is never passive. To hear is to be implicated. We are not detached auditors of unreliable narrators; we are drawn into their games of self-deception and manipulation. This is why literature teaches something subtler than suspicion. It teaches that every act of listening is perspectival, entangled, risky.

Suspicion alone, of course, can become corrosive. If every narrator is unreliable, then perhaps all voices are worthless. This was Plato’s fear, and it resurfaces in our age as cynicism and conspiracy. When suspicion becomes the default, nothing can be trusted. The hermeneutics of suspicion, left unchecked, collapses into paranoia.

But literature also models another way. By attending carefully to unreliable narrators, we discover that even lies disclose something. Odysseus’ tall tales reveal his cunning. The Pardoner’s fraud exposes the machinery of indulgence. Humbert’s self-justifications uncover the danger of rhetoric. Clamence’s monologue lays bare the entanglement of confession and power. Unreliability is not the absence of truth but the form in which truth arrives: fractured, mediated, unstable.

Today the stakes of unreliable narration are no longer confined to poetry or fiction. Propaganda machines, information wars, and deepfakes saturate the public sphere with voices that look and sound authoritative but conceal distortions by design. Algorithms curate our attention, not to enlighten but to monetize. In such a landscape, literature may seem quaint, irrelevant, a luxury for leisure. Yet it matters more than ever—not for its plots or its dramas, but for the discipline it cultivates. Literature teaches us how to read, how to watch, how to listen with suspicion and with care, how to notice the dissonance between what is said and what is revealed. The act of reading unreliable narrators is preparation for inhabiting a world where unreliability is not the exception but the norm.

This is what Paul Ricoeur called the “second naïveté”—a capacity to believe again, but with awareness. After suspicion comes a more mature form of listening, one that neither takes every word at face value nor dismisses every word as false. It is a mode of double-hearing: catching both the surface of the story and the deeper patterns that surface betrays.

Such listening requires self-awareness. We cannot recognize Clamence’s trap without noticing how it works on us. We cannot see the pathos in Don Quixote without acknowledging our own longing for enchantment. To listen well is not to suspend judgment but to bring one’s own perspective into play, to recognize that understanding is always a dialogue between voices.

The danger of unreliable narration, then, is not simply that others may deceive us. It is that we are never fully transparent to ourselves. Augustine worried, even in confessing, whether he was truly telling the truth about his own motives. The Rabbis remind us that Torah is given “in the language of human beings,” which is to say, in voices that are never pure. Modern psychology confirms the point: memory itself is reconstructive, a kind of fiction. To be human is to be unreliable narrators of our own lives.

We live, in other words, inside stories that cannot be entirely trusted. And yet those very stories are our medium of truth. Myth, fiction, confession, history: all are unreliable, all are indispensable. Literature does not eliminate the tension. It teaches us how to inhabit it.

This is why Euripides’ line matters. “Unless the poets lie” is not a dismissal but a challenge. The poets do lie, or at least they tell truths slant. But in learning how to listen to them, we become more skillful at listening to one another, and even to ourselves. We learn that listening is not the same as agreement, that suspicion must be tempered by charity, that truth is rarely unmediated but always emerges through the cracks of unreliable speech.

We cannot escape stories. The only choice is whether to be victims of their seductions, or attentive readers who can hear in their unreliability the shape of deeper psychological truths. Literature, in training us for the latter, is not ornamental. It is existential.