Of course, all this talk of honesty doesn't mean the narrator might not be fooling himself. The unreliable narrator is one of the charms and risks of first-person. (I am firmly convinced that House, for example, if he were writing his own story, would be one of the most unreliable narrators in the history of the planet. Which is ironic from someone who values realism as much as he does.) The risk to the author is that some readers may not pick up that the protagonist's view of his reality is inaccurate, or to what degree he's fooling himself -- and whether, on some level, he knows it and is avoiding opening that closet door.