The Cask Of Amontillado, And The Raven, By Edgar Allan Poe

Maria Semple once said, “There’s something uniquely exhilarating about puzzling together the truth at the hands of an unreliable narrator.” This - as most readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s many works know - is true. The narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Cask of Amontillado”, and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe are unreliable because they have emotional instability, are mentally unstable, and frequently alter the truth.
The narrators in Poe’s stories are unreliable because they experience sudden extreme emotions, making them emotionally unstable. This is displayed in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, when the narrator exclaims, “Is it not clear that I am not mad?” (page 1, paragraph 1) Before this, the narrator has been calmly explaining his point of

Though this seems reasonable, in reality, none of it is applicable since not only are the narrators of these stories unreliable because they are emotionally and mentally unstable, but they are also undependable because they lie a lot. The narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado” lies many times, including to Fortunato. The dialogue reads, “ ‘I drink’, he said, ‘to the buried that repose around us.’ ‘And I to your long life.’ ” (page 3, paragraphs 40-41) In this excerpt, Montresor and Fortunato are sharing one of their many drinks of wine in the catacombs that Montresor has planned to intoxicate Fortunato. Fortunato dedicates his drink to the dead members of Montresor’s family buried in the catacombs. Meanwhile, Montresor says he wishes Fortunato would have a long and prosperous life. Despite this, on the inside, Montresor knows that Fortunato’s life will not be happy and successful and will end within several hours. Since Montresor is lying about this, what will possibly make the reader believe that he is telling the truth about the main and finer points of the tale? The narrator also states that “For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.” (page 4, paragraph 87) Since it has been 50 years since the story has taken place, Montresor may have altered some of the details in his memory to hide something from the audience. The reason that this is a possible explanation is that people believe what they want to believe. So, if there was a small detail or even a large portion of the story that Montresor was ashamed of or wished had not happened, he may have forced himself to forget or fed himself a lie to let it slip from his memory. “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s narrator also lies and makes himself unreliable in paragraph 14 on page 4. He writes, “The cry, I said, was my own, in a dream. The old man, I said, was away.” At this point in the