Unreliable Narrator

Unreliable narrator

The purpose of the assignment is to experiment with conveying the point of view of an "unreliable narrator." "Unreliable narrators" appear often in fiction and help give depth and complexity to narrators. An unreliable narrator is a narrator who you cannot trust. It could be one person with different personalities. The writer deliberately creates an unreliable narrator to confuse you and to make you solving the mysteries that exists behind the narrators mind.

I have read a couple of texts that include an unreliable narrator. Yellow wallpaper is one of them. Yellow wallpaper is about a woman living with her husband. She loves to write but at the same time she has some mental problems and therefore her husband, who is a doctor, forbids her to write. She won't listen to her husband and begins to write in secret. She is very obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom and the fact that there is another woman living on the other side of the wallpaper. The obsession gets worse and worse and she begins to hallucinate and do weird things as crawling around.

The first person narrator in this story is the woman. She is creative because she likes to write. She suffers from nervous depression, and therefore her husband won't allow her to write because she has to focus on getting better. In the story we are told that she has a kid who is a little boy, but the information about the little boy is very limited. She is living in very isolated conditions. It almost seems like she is a resident in a mental asylum or a prison. There are bars in front of the window and the bed is nailed to floor and considering the fact that her husband won't let her write could be signs of her being a prisoner in her own home. The woman in this story is unreliable because she is obsessed with satisfaction. She wants to write, she wants to find out who is hiding behind the wallpaper etc. It means that her id overrules her superego, which is the morality behind our actions. She is not able to control her id and therefore she cannot be trusted.

Boogeyman is also one of the texts including an unreliable narrator that I have written. Boogeyman is about a man telling about the killings of his kids to a psychiatrist. He explain to the psychiatrist that his children died of different reasons but that they all cried "boogeyman" before dying. He is sure that it is boogeyman that killed all of them, but it seems like it is just an excuse for his actions. It seems like he cannot make a distinction between real life and fantasy. Boogeyman must be a dark part of his life that exists deep inside him, maybe something from his childhood. He is very afraid of this boogeyman because of the fact that he is willing not to protect his own kids so that he can avoid him. Many would also wonder how a father can kill his kids. In this particular it could be the fact that