Strawberry Spring Is The Most Unreliable Narrator

The definition of an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe, has the caretaker, who murders his charge due to believing the man’s eye is evil. The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 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, by Stephen King, has a narrator who does not recognize he is the notorious serial killer Springheel Jack until eight years after the murders. Of the three narrators, Strawberry Spring’s narrator is the most unreliable when it comes to explaining the events of the story due to either inadvertently omitting information or possibly

lying outright to the reader.
Strawberry Spring’s narrator’s unreliability generally stems from the fact that having important details left out makes him seem more normal in comparison to the other narrators. Some might say that the caretaker is more unreliable than Strawberry Spring’s narrator, as the caretaker actively tries to convince the reader that he is not insane. He claims that his disease “…is but over-acuteness of the sense.” (1) However, his insistence throughout the story while describing in detail how and why he murders the old man only emphasizes to the reader that he is mad. In contrast, the narrator in Strawberry Spring is described as being a bystander to the events that take place, until the reveal that he was responsible for the murders all along. Both the wife and the caretaker acknowledge they are mentally ill, and thus hint at being unreliable, on the first page of their respective 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). The narrator in Strawberry Spring 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 point. The caretaker is fixated on the old man’s eye, the wife is obsessed with the wallpaper, and Strawberry Spring’s narrator, the fog and the murders. However, the narrator’s fascination with the deaths can easily be interpreted as morbid curiosity before the reveal, as several of the other students on campus are just as engrossed in the case as he is. This causes the narrator to seem more like the average college student; while in comparison the caretaker and the wife are clearly alienated from the people around them.
The wife may appear to be the most unreliable, as she hallucinates throughout the story.

The caretaker hallucinates as well, but only in the two specific instances when he swore he could hear the old man’s heart beating. The narrator of Strawberry Spring is entirely unaware of what he does on the foggy nights when he goes outside, up until the climax, whereas the wife and the caretaker are both fairly conscious of their actions. Eight years after the original murders in Strawberry Spring, strawberry spring comes again, and a girl’s dismembered body is discovered in the morning. The narrator’s wife asks where he was the night before, and he maintains that he cannot remember anything beyond driving home in the fog. The reveal hits when he realizes that he is irrationally afraid to open his car trunk after finding out that the murder victim had pieces of her missing. While all of the narrators genuinely believe they’re either doing the right thing or have done nothing at all, Strawberry Spring’s narrator initially seems to have no involvement in the murders in any way. At the end of the story, he even seems horrified at the implication that he is Springheel Jack, indicating that he is completely oblivious to his actions up until his

realization.