To Kill a Mockingbird

Scout's childhood thoughts are often stated as fact, even if her adult self understands things differently. While Scout narrates the novel as an adult looking back on her childhood, she does not come across as a didactic narrator—on the contrary, she will often step back and present situations to the reader as they would have appeared to her childhood self. As a result, in many scenes Scout is an unreliable narrator, her thoughts presented to the reader as factual information despite being the misgivings of a child's mind.

One example of this occurs in Chapter 1, where Scout talks about the Radley House and Boo for the first time:

Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down, and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work.

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