The thing about my brain that I dislike the most is that I live my life with my brain as an unreliable narrator. Never boring, though.
All five types, but mostly the Madman and the Liar, sadly enough.
- The Pícaro: a narrator who is characterized by exaggeration and bragging, the first example probably being the soldier in Plautus’s comedy Miles Gloriosus. Examples in modern literature are Moll Flanders, Simplicius Simplicissimus or Felix Krull.
- The Madman: A narrator who has severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or paranoia. Examples include Poe’s Montresor in The Cask of Amontillado, Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal, or Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
- The Clown: A narrator who does not take narrations seriously and consciously plays with conventions, truth and the reader’s expectations. Examples of the type include Tristram Shandy.
- The Naíf: A narrator whose perception is immature or limited through his or her point of view. Examples include Huckleberry Finn or Holden Caulfield
- The Liar: A mature narrator of sound cognition who deliberately misrepresents himself, often to obscure his unseemly or discreditable past conduct. John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier exemplifies this kind of narrator, as does Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
