“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” –(656). The narrator of the story has a complex personality. Who is to say she is round but static? Many readers have their own opinion whether to say she is reliable or not. In this essay, we’ll be discussing what makes the narrator unreliable. How does the character enhance the story, and how would it change if told by another character perspective? An unreliable narrator is a character that tells the story but is not completely accurate due to the problems they face. In the beginning of the story, the narrator explains that she takes medication “…I take phosphates or phosphites-whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, …show more content…
It is very interesting on how the narrator adds more to the story. Since the reader is only able to see what is the narrator feeling or thinking at the moment. We can’t see how other characters might be reacting around her, because it is only first person point of view. However, the narrator does begin to make the reader question what is really happening to her. All though she loves her bedroom, at some point in the story, the narrator begins to describe how much she hates the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom. Her hate towards the yellow wallpaper becomes an obsession, in which she describes that she “sees” a woman trapped in the wallpaper desperate to escape out of it. “…I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wallpaper till I felt creepy. The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.”-(652). With the narrator taking medication, sleeping in separate rooms from her husband, and now having illusions of a woman being trapped in the wallpaper. The reader can analyze that the narrator is most likely going through a depression or some type of mental …show more content…
For example, we see that the narrator is not in best fit to tell the story, because of her condition. Yet, we have her husband John, who is actually a physician that takes care of the narrator. John wants what is best for the narrator, he wants her to rest and to do no work at all including writing “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word.”-(649). There is a scene on page 649 where there could be a slight hint to where the narrator is staying. When the narrator asks John, if they can renovate the room a bit, he replies to her “You know the place is doing you some good…”. There could be a possibility that the narrator is in a hospital, because there is not much for her to do other than to get well as recommended by her
D'hoker, Elke, and Gunther Martens, eds. Narrative unreliability in the twentieth-century first-person novel. Vol. 14. Walter de Gruyter, 2008.
To start off, first, the narrator thinks that the house her and her husband John are renting for the next three months is haunted or it wouldn’t be as cheap as it is for being such a beautiful place. Another thing is that she unhappy in her marriage. Her husband doesn’t listen to her, tells her she’s wrong and laughs at her. She is feeling very unwell and all he says is she has temporary nervous depression and only tells her to stay in bed and do nothing. The way she describes things is very bleak, dark, depressing. She keeps going back to thoughts of the house being haunted and gets anxious. She becomes angry with John for no reason sometimes and thinks it’s from her ‘nervous condition’. Something the reader may not catch onto when she talks about how she doesn’t like her bedroom is how she took the nursery, so right away, we know she has a baby. She feels trapped with the barred windows and not being able to go anywhere, having to just lay down and look at the most revolting yellow wallpaper shes ever seen. Writing the story alone makes her extremely exhausted and she says that John doesn’t know the extent of her suffering. Eventually, it’s made known that she can’t even go near her own child and it makes her increasingly nervous. She has unwanted thoughts throughout the entire story of the terrifying ugly yellow
In everyday day life we go through changes and sometimes we even break down to the point we do not know what to do with ourselves, but in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story” The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is an obsessive person. The story focuses on a woman who is going through postpartum depression and has had a nervous breakdown. Her husband John moves her into a home where he wants her to rest in isolation to recover from her disorder. Throughout her time in the room the narrator discovers new things and finally understands life.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
After reading Charlotte Perkins Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" I have come to think that the narrator does not suffer from hysteria. I have reached this idea from comparing the research I have done on hysteria to her symptoms in the story. In this paper I will discuss why I feel the narrator does not suffer from hysteria but may be suffering from postpartum depression.
In life, many people strive to find a person that is reliable and to separate the people that are unreliable. Unreliable can be defined as an adjective meaning not dependable. Having read through the short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King, it is reasonable to conclude that each of these stories has its own unreliable narrator. The most unreliable narrator, however, is the narrator/killer Springheel Jack from “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King due to the narrator’s cognition problems and the violent nature of the murders.
An unreliable narrator is when the character unconsciously doesn’t tell the entire story as we are seeing it from one pair of eyes. Although one could say that it’s an unreliable first person point of view. Yunior does not show any sign of trying to make himself appear better instead he is unreliable in the sense of how he is telling the story. “She has big stupid lips and a sad moon face and the driest skin” (Diaz 145).
Although, for her, she has nothing more to focus on she trusts her imagination to pass the time. Over time she becomes more and more obsessed with the yellow wallpaper, which leaves her in shock. “The wallpaper becomes a projection screen of the narrator growing fright.” (Berman, p.47) This means that the narrator goes to herself on the wall. The isolated woman in the yellow paper is her own reflection. Something that the narrator still does not realize, she only feels the need to release the woman trapped in the wall. She refers to her room as a prison continuously. As she begins to feel isolated she projects her feelings on the yellow wallpaper, but the idea that the room is her prison goes from figurative to reality as insulation deepens her need to escape in some way. “Every time the narrator speaks, she is interrupted and contradicted until she begins to interrupt and contradict herself.” (Berman, p.55) She has her own plan for recovery. But unfortunately, her husband does not listen. For him, the only
In the short story, the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator chooses to write about a married woman in a new home who ultimately falls down into a spiral of insanity. The Yellow Wallpaper centers primarily on the narrator and her discovery in the room she must stay in to rest. There she sees a yellow wallpaper that soon begins to take the form of a woman who is trapped, and is shaking the wallpaper in order to get out. The narrator continues trying to figure out the wallpaper and its pattern until eventually deciding to rip the wallpaper off in an attempt to free the creeping woman trapped inside. Thus, the narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper suffers a mental collapse by going insane in her attempt to understand the wallpaper which can be attributed
The Narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator becomes more depressed throughout the story because of the recommendation of isolation that was made to her. In this short story, the narrator is detained in a lonesome, drab room in an attempt to free herself of a nervous disorder. The narrator’s husband, a physician, adheres to this belief and forces his wife into a treatment of solitude. Rather than heal the narrator of her psychological disorder, the treatment only contributes to its effects, driving her into severe depression.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a woman descending into psychosis in a creepy tale which depicts the harm of an old therapy called “rest cure.” This therapy was used to treat women who had “slight hysterical tendencies” and depression, and basically it consisted of the inhibition of the mental processes. The label “slight hysterical tendency” indicates that it is not seen as a very important issue, and it is taken rather lightly. It is also ironic because her illness is obviously not “slight” by any means, especially towards the end when the images painted of her are reminiscent of a psychotic, maniacal person, while she aggressively tears off wallpaper and confuses the real world with her alternative world she has fabricated that includes a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator of this story grows obsessed with the wallpaper in her room because her husband minimizes her exposure to the outside world and maximizes her rest.
Liar, deceiving, opinionated, mischievous. These are all characteristics of an unreliable narrator. Strawberry Spring by Stephen King which was about a mysterious fog and a man who starts to kill women on a college campus along with the occurrence of the fog. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe was about a person who drove himself crazy of guilt for killing a man known to have a “vulture eye”. Lastly, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman this was about a woman who believes she is ill, but her husband does not believe her. She claims to see figures in the wallpaper of her bedroom and becomes insane. These stories provide examples of unreliable narrators. While these stories portray unreliability through lying, sneaking around,
When a narrator is deemed unreliable, there is conflict between the narrator’s presentation and the rest of the novel that makes readers suspect his sincerity and reliability. Readers often read between the lines and come to the conclusion that the narrator is either withholding the true version of the story or lacking the ability to tell the truth. There are three specific sources of unreliability according to Rimmon-Keenan they are the narrator’s limited knowledge, his or her personal involvement, and his or her questionable morals (100-101). Factors that could contribute to a narrator’s unreliability is that the narrator is young and inexperienced, old with failing memory, or has a low IQ. These are all cases of limited understanding and knowledge on the part of the narrator. When narrators are personally involved in the story, they tend to portray events or characters i...
Upon moving in to her home she is captivated, enthralled with the luscious garden, stunning greenhouse and well crafted colonial estate. This was a place she fantasized about, qualifying it as a home in which she seemed comfortable and free. These thoughts don’t last for long, however, when she is prescribed bed rest. She begins to think that the wallpaper, or someone in the wallpaper is watching her making her feel crazy. She finally abandons her positivity towards what now can be considered her husband’s home, and only labels negative features of the home. For example, the narrator rants about the wallpaper being, “the strangest yellow…wallpaper! It makes me think of… foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman). One can only imagine the mental torture that the narrator is experiencing, staring at the lifeless, repulsive yellow hue of ripping
The narrator is the person telling the story and can range from one to several, within a single story. How the author develops the narration will direct how their work is perceived by the reader. The narrator can present the story reliably or dishonestly, from a compelling view to an ironic view. The author can lose or gain pertinent information simply by changing the narration. Narration is a guide for the reader “…it requires the invention of a narrator,” Diane Middlebook said, “who serves as a contemporary guide to the materials of the book…” (Middlebrook). The narrator of a story is fundamental to the reader’s understanding and, any changes to the narration can change the stories understanding entirely.