Comparing Tell-Tale Heart And The Yellow Wallpaper

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, Strawberry Spring by Stephen King, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman all have one thing in common, an unreliable narrator. The Tell-Tale Heart has the caretaker, who murders his charge. The Yellow Wallpaper has the wife, who hallucinates that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper when she is locked in her room by her husband. Strawberry Spring has a narrator who does not recognize he is the notorious serial killer Springheel Jack until eight years after the murders.
Some might say that the caretaker is more unreliable than Springheel Jack. The caretaker actively tries to convince the reader that he is not insane, claiming that his disease “…is but over-acuteness of the sense.” However, his insistence throughout the story while describing in detail how he murders the old man only emphasizes to the reader that he is mad. In contrast, the narrator in Strawberry

Both the wife and the caretaker acknowledge they are mentally ill, and thus hint at being unreliable, on the first page of their stories. The wife asserts that her husband “does not believe [she] is sick,” (5) and he believes she has “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency.” (5) The caretaker states that “the disease had sharpened [his] senses –not destroyed –not dulled them.” (1). Meanwhile, Springheel Jack never states anything regarding his mental health, which leads the reader to expect him to be more stable and reliable than the other narrators. Each of the narrators has an obsession with something that serves as a plot