Unreliable and Limited Narrators

A narrator tells you what happened, but a narrator can also be wrong, biased, or simply too young or inexperienced to understand everything happening around them. When a narrator's account cannot be fully trusted, readers call that narrator unreliable. Sometimes a narrator lies on purpose, shading events to make themselves look better. More often, especially in stories about children, a narrator is limited rather than dishonest. They report exactly what they see and hear, but they do not yet have the knowledge or experience to understand what it means. Either way, the job shifts to the reader. You have to read past what the narrator tells you and notice what the narrator cannot tell you, because they do not fully see it themselves.

Writers use limited and unreliable narration because some truths land harder when a reader has to find them alone. If a story simply announced that a character was condescending toward a family because of their race, the observation would sit on the surface and lose its weight. Let a child narrator report that character's words and posture without fully grasping why they sting, and the reader does the work of naming the problem themselves. That gap between what a narrator understands and what a reader can see is called dramatic irony, and it is the tool that makes a limited narrator so effective. The reader ends up trusting the story more, not less, because the narrator never oversold anything.

Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer from the Georgian Bay Métis Community, uses exactly this technique in her 2025 story "The Forest Tells a Story." The story follows ten-year-old Joanie through the day her mother collapses and is taken to the hospital. Joanie reports what she notices: the nuns at her school mock her family's French, the town doctor addresses her cousin slowly as though he cannot understand English, and her family sometimes flavours their soup with bones instead of meat. Joanie herself does not comment on any of this. She is ten, and to her these are just facts about her day. The reader, meanwhile, can see the racism and the poverty pressing on this family from every side, exactly because Joanie cannot yet name it that way. Dimaline never has to explain the injustice directly. She lets a limited narrator walk through it and trusts the reader to catch up.

Re-reading matters here. On a first read, you follow Joanie's day: her mother gets sick, she gathers medicine, her mother recovers. On a second read, once you already know how the story ends, you can go back and notice the moments Joanie walked past without comment, the ones that actually carried the story's weight. That is the real skill this lesson builds: not just spotting when a narrator is unreliable, but learning to read a text twice, once for what happens and once for what the narrator missed.

Before You Read

Hold these two questions in mind as you read "The Forest Tells a Story." Where does Joanie report something without understanding its full weight, something you as the reader can see more clearly than she can? After you finish, what changes if you go back and re-read the story's opening page a second time?