An Unreliable Narrator In Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

Heart racing, breathing accelerating, perspiration building and hallucinations forming. A person dealing with this hectic state is in no good condition to tell a story from. A good narrator is aware, alert, in good health and is truthful. Under the stress of either a certain situation or even a mental illness, these characteristics of a good narrator become altered, twisted, and/or mutated. There are many stories that include a narrator who has hallucinations and is depicted as one with a mental illness. Such as, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” features a caretaker who murders an old man for having uneasy feelings about his eye. “Strawberry Spring,” written by Stephen King, pictures a narrator who brutally slaughters innocent people

The narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” experiences hallucinations which causes him to be an unreliable source of info. One could argue that the woman from “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an unreliable narrator because she also experiences hallucinations. She says, “The front pattern DOES move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Gilman 9). The woman does indeed have delusions; however, she only has them due to her isolation from regular everyday human life and activities. On that note, the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” says, “I admit the deed!--Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!” (Poe 4). The caretaker appears to be losing his mind here over his apparent recognition of hearing the heart of the old man still beating. Strangely enough, this man is undeniably dead. Yet, the narrator argues that he can still hear his heart beating and it is beating, in fact, so loud to where he just cannot take it anymore. The narrator is really concerned about the old man’s particular eye. When he does kill the old man, he announces, “His eye would trouble me no more” (Poe 3). Clearly, the caretaker is imagining that the old man’s eye specifically exists in this world to cause him trouble and/or suffering. It is hinted in the story that the old man is blind. Therefore, the old man cannot give his caretaker any sort of ‘evil eye’ to make him feel that way. The hallucinations that the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees make him the most unreliable because he is unaware of what is real life and what is