An unreliable narrator motif was employed by Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a novel that generated much controversy due to critics' contention that it was unfair to trick the reader in such a manipulative manner.
An example of a reversal for ill would be Agamemnon's sudden murder at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' The Oresteia or the inescapable situation Kate Hudson's character finds herself in at the end of The Skeleton Key.
A positive reversal of fortune would be Nicholas Van Orton's suicide attempt after mistakenly believing himself to have accidentally killed his brother, only to land safely in the midst of his own birthday party, in the film The Game.
It refers to an unexpected, artificial or improbable character, device or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction to resolve a situation or untangle a plot.
The term is now used pejoratively for any improbable or unexpected contrivance by which an author resolves the complications of the plot in a play or novel, and which has not been convincingly prepared for in the preceding action; the discovery of a lost will was a favorite resort of Victorian novelists.
The red herring is a type of misdirection, a device intended to distract the protagonist, and by extension the reader, away from the correct answer or from the site of pertinent clues or action.
In the William Diehl novel Primal Fear (also adapted into a film), a defendant named Aaron Stampler is accused of brutally murdering the Archbishop of Chicago.
Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None is another famous example and includes the term as well in a murder ploy where the intended victims are made to guess that one of them will be killed through an act of treachery.
Another instance is the film Executive Decision, in which the special-forces team leader, played by highly-billed action star Steven Seagal, is killed shortly after the mission begins.
The Aeneid, another epic poem, uses a similar approach; it begins with the main protagonist, Aeneas, telling stories about the end of the Trojan War and the first half of his journey to Dido, queen of Carthage.
The nonlinear approach has been used in works such as the films Mulholland Drive, Sin City, Saw IV, Premonition, Arrival, Pulp Fiction, Memento, Babel, the television shows Lost, How to Get Away with Murder, How I Met Your Mother (especially in many episodes in the later seasons), Heroes, Westworld, the book Catch-22, and WandaVision.
Examples employing this technique include the films Irréversible, Memento, Happy End and 5x2, the play Betrayal by Harold Pinter, and Martin Amis' Time's Arrow.
Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along and the 1934 Kaufman and Hart play that inspired it both tell the story of the main characters in reverse order.