There are certain stories where the narrator's sanity can be questioned and often times this depends on the setting they are placed in or other external factors. Two such stories are The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In both of these stories, the narrative is driven by the narrator's descent into insanity. However, the impact of the short stories' atmospheres on the narrators' psyche took on different forms. To start off with, in the case of the narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart, he seems to be sane and in control of his actions at the very beginning. But things quickly change when he starts to get weary of the old man, who he seems to be living with at the time, misty eye. It causes him a great deal of distress and almost acts as a sort of catalyst for the rest of the story to come. Compared to the features of the old man's eye however, something that had a greater effect on this narrator's psyche was the heavy pounding of his heart. After committing his cold-blooded murder, he first tries to conceal all the evidence. But even after he had gotten away with his crime, he was ultimately driven mad by his own guilt and had succumbed to it. …show more content…
At first glance, she seems like an ordinary woman going through something heartbreaking, but she slowly loses more and more of her senses throughout the story, mainly because of the prison-like room she's trapped in. She's being kept captive against her will in a dimly lit room with iron bars on the window frames and most notably, with musky yellow wallpapers on every wall. The wallpaper's seemingly never-ending patterns seem to take the greatest toll on her psyche and as a result, her condition gradually worsens. However, the setting of The Yellow Wallpaper isn't the only variable that affects the narrator's mental