: Re: How to deceive the MC My protagonist is finally meeting with the big boss of a mafia. At least, he thinks he is. The boss actually sends someone to pretend to be him. I'm writing from the

@Annie587

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If you use a first-person narrator, no problem. Readers expect a first person narrator to reflect the knowledge and opinions of that person. If I was reading someone's diary and read, "I met the boss", and then later he says, "Oh, that wasn't really the boss, they fooled me", I wouldn't say he lied, just that he was mistaken.
A third person narrator can be presented as a fallible human. Like some stories will start out saying something like, "Here's the story as Jack told it to me" or some such, and then switch to third person for the bulk of the story. But the reader still identifies the narrator with the fallible human who is relating the story.
But yes, generally we expect a third person narrator to be omniscient and infallible. If in the beginning of the story you say "Jack met the boss" and later you say that that wasn't really the boss, the reader may well feel like you lied to him.
I think the solution to this is careful wording. Don't have the narrator say, "He met the boss." Have a character say this in dialog.
For example:

"It's time for you to meet the Boss," Mr Miller said.
Miller led Jack down the hall and through a door. A tall, gray-haired man was sitting behind a desk.
"Are you the Boss?" Jack asked.
"Yes, I am," he said.

Etc. I'm not claiming this is a brilliantly done scene, but note that as I wrote it, the narrator never says that this person is the boss. The narrator simply relates that Miller said this and that the man behind the desk said so.
Sometimes getting the wording right for this sort of thing is tricky. You don't want to make it obvious to the reader that you are carefully avoiding saying something. Like I'd avoid something like

Miller introduced him to the person he said was the boss.

That wording is awkward and a reader may well suspect you're avoiding saying he actually is the boss. But

Miller said, "Here's the boss."

That doesn't sound suspicious. It's exactly what you might write if the person really was the boss. You need to make it flow naturally. Later, when the reader figures out that this person was a fake, he may flip back to this scene and say, "Ohhhhh, he never actually said that this person was the boss, just that Miller said he was the boss ..." And that's fine.

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