Module Introduction

An unreliable narrator is one whose credibility has been compromised for one reason or another. In literary texts, the author offers clues to the lack of credibility of the character for the reader, and in this way suggests alternate interpretations of the text and the author’s worldview. Readers can construct some of the worldviews of texts based on the discrepancies between what an unreliable character sees and what the audience sees, thus interpreting the discourse or norms of the author.

This module was used in a 9th-grade classroom. The sequence of instruction of the four-week unit gave students repeated experiences with the learning goals and allowed strategies for complex literary reasoning to be explicitly scaffolded. In the first week, cultural data sets and short monologues helped activate prior knowledge of strategies and with identifying cues for unreliability. Each of the following three weeks, students engaged in readings of various literary texts and in writing of arguments in which they made claims about the reliability of the narrator and the evidence that supports it, along with explanations of worldviews offered by the texts.