Which textual signals make a reader (or a classifier) conclude that a narrator is unreliable, and how do the signals differ by what they depend on?

The Handbook entries list concrete signals: contradiction with real-world fact, mismatch between an earlier report and the actual outcome, other characters' consistent disagreement, internal contradictions and verbal tics, conflicts between narrators, and paratextual types. They also stress that unreliability is a reader's hypothesis competing with other explanations (author error, genre, fictional-world rules, function), so a signal works only if it makes the narrator-based explanation the best one. An open 2025 LLM study operationalises three Hansen types and reports that detection works best for within-narration tics and poorly for signals needing comparison or outside knowledge. Curator qualifications: Curator located the evidence excerpts in the work copies (automated case-insensitive prefix match). The E9 excerpt ('Statement of potential disbelief') was not located; the rest are present. The rhetorical vs constructivist disagreement (Shen) is kept. Give a locator for E9 or drop it. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

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