Unreliable Narrator In The Tell Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote, “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” This highlights the way that mentally ill people sometimes feel like they are saner than everyone else and believe they are better off than those around them. In “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King, a college student narrates the story of his college being haunted by a serial killer. Throughout the story, he struggles to recall nights he spent walking in the fog until he discovers he may be the serial killer. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator documents her struggle with mental illness in a journal she keeps in secret. Her mental health deteriorates throughout the story, causing her to hallucinate a figure trapped behind the wallpaper in her room. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator

The most unreliable narrator is from “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe because he is extremely paranoid and tries to justify murdering someone.

The narrator from the “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s extreme paranoia and auditory hallucinations cause him to be the most unreliable narrator out of all the three stories. While some may argue that the narrator from the “The Yellow Wallpaper” could be the most unreliable because she hallucinates that there is a figure hidden behind the wallpaper, for example when she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” The narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart is more unreliable because he often thinks others are out to get him. For example, when he is sitting in his home with the police and hears the old man’s heartbeat from under the floorboards he says, “They heard!- they suspected!- they knew!- they were making a mockery of my horror!- this I thought, and this I think.” This illustrates that the narrator is paranoid and believes the police are mocking him by not reacting to the heartbeat. He struggles to separate what he perceives in his mind from reality. He is the most unreliable due to