I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently
Some types of unreliable narrator:
The Watson: is present for the event but does not have the same level of perception as protagonist
The Lemony Snicket: isn't present for the event, reconstructs the facts based on later research, can get things wrong or incomplete
The Ted Moseby: is present for the event but has romanticised and embellished their memory of it through nostalgia to an extent that you cannot fully believe it; is also prone to misremembering or outright forgetting details.
The Katniss Everdeen: is present for the event, is the protagonist, but is completely foreign to the world and out of their depth so they don't quite understand a lot of what is going on.
The Rose Quartz: is present for the event, but due to their personal agenda or feelings of shame hides and embellishes what actually happened in favour of a version that paints them in a better light.
The Big Brother: overwrites what actually happened in favour of propaganda.
The Jonathan Harker: is absolutely clueless about what is going on around them and the genre they're in so their perception of events is tinted by their own naivety.
The Goob: the narrator's own emotional bias clouds their judgement of what really happened.
The Tyler Durden: the narrator is suffering from hallucinations and doesn't realise it.
The Pi: the narrator has survived a traumatic experience and copes with it by turning it into a wonderful tale.
Everyone is the unreliable narrator of their own lives.
EVERYONE! IS THE! UNRELIABLE! NARRATOR! OF THEIR OWN LIVES!!
