No, there are totally ways to show that a first-person narrator is unreliable and/or a bad person. Otherwise, you could argue that Nabokov and similar people actually approved of their creepy pedophile heroes.

The text suggests they don't. Meyers's text suggests she does approve of hers.

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The Hunger Games are actually really good about this. Though everything is from Katniss' perspective, you'll eventually start picking up on the stuff she's missing. Little inconsistencies -- behaviors misattributed, things she notes because they are there but don't carry much significance for her (but, might carry significance for another character), etc.

Which isn't to say that Katniss is a bad person -- she's not -- but, rather, that it's totally possible in a book intended for teenagers, with a realistic teenage protagonist narrating their experiences in the first person, to let the reader know that their narrator is unreliable and doesn't understand what's going on in full.

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She actually did those things. Bella is pretty often called uncaring by other characters and her family members. She obviously blows off anyone who isn't part of her magic worldview. She very obviously uses people for her own ends and she pretty obviously only reacts well to people who treat her poorly. What more were you looking for?

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Bella is pretty often called uncaring by other characters and her family members.

...who are portrayed as wrong to do so. Anyone who doesn't like Bella, in-story, is a Mean Girl or a repressive authority figure or whatever.

She obviously blows off anyone who isn't part of her magic worldview. She very obviously uses people for her own ends and she pretty obviously only reacts well to people who treat her poorly.

...for which she faces exactly no consequences and, in fact, gets to turn into a sparkly vampire and spend the rest of her life with her sparkly vampire soulmate. (And now I just typed the word "soulmate", twice, and need to go boil my hands. In acid.)

So, no.

I'd love to think that Meyers was actually showing that this is a bad person who ends up in a horrible situation, but "People who get no positive portrayals disapprove of her! And she ends up exactly where she wants to be!" is not an argument for that.

I mean, come on. "She's not a Mary Sue because Snape picks on her!" gets used for every Ebony Darqueness HP fanfic out there, and is not a valid argument there either.

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