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The Most Unreliable Narrator In The Yellow Wallpaper

Decent Essays

As Madchen Amick, an American actress, once said, “It is possible and very common to overcome and manage a mental illness,” unfortunately, for a specific group of narrators this was not the case. While reading three stories, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Strawberry Spring by Stephen King, there is two commonalities throughout all of these stories, the narrators are all mentally ill and in turn, unreliable. It is hard to judge who is the most unreliable between the selection of twisted stories, whither it be the murderer who does not know what he has done at a college campus in the story Strawberry Spring, or the man who’s plotted to murder an old man due to paranoia about the old man’s eye in the story Tell Tale Heart, or the lady …show more content…

Although, when a decision does have to be made, the narrator from The Yellow Wallpaper has the most unreliable narrator because she is oppressed by men and she has hallucinations.
The narrator from The Yellow Wallpaper is the most unreliable because she is oppressed by the men around her. Readers may argue that the narrator from Tell Tale Heart is the most unreliable because he believes he can hear everything on Earth, Heaven and Hell. However, the narrator from The Yellow Wallpaper is more unreliable because she is oppressed by the men around her, denying her self expression. In the story, on page one, the narrator has just moved into a building she believes is a rental home that her and her husband, a doctor will stay until the narrator's illness goes away. One of the ways of “treatment” the husband is trying out is to lock the narrator in a bright yellow room without any stimulation, even if it is against her personal opinion. The narrator writes, “ I am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again… Personally, I believe that congenial work with excitement and change would do me good,”.

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