Choose three quotations from “The Yellow Wall-Paper” that convince you that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator and explain why for each.

An unreliable narrator is one that makes you questions whether or not he or she is telling the truth. In the story” the yellow wall-paper”, I will say the narrator is unreliable because she is mentally disturbed. Therefore, it is very hard for one to say she is truthfully explaining herself. One approach that shows the narrator unreliability is when she said “ I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes”. This demonstrates that she doesn’t have a reason to be angry with him, she cannot control her emotions and she doesn’t know why she feels the ways she feels sometimes, which indicates that she cannot be a reliable person.

Another proof of unreliability is the way she quickly changes her minds and opinions about things. One moment she likes something, later she hates it and then she likes again. For example, “ the wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother-they must have had perseverance as well as hatred, but I don’t mind it a bit only the paper”. She seems to strongly dislike the wallpaper, but later on she mention “ I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall paper”. Discovering so many new things about the patterns of the wallpaper fascinates her. Moreover, according to her, she is healing because of the wallpaper. Therefore, we can say that her feelings toward the wallpaper are not quite consistent.

Moreover, she is so lost in her own world that she refuses to believe her husband and her brother when they are telling her about her condition even though she knows they are both doctors. She states “ but I am smarter than them “, which indicates that she is tricking them. She believes that no one understands her and only she knows what’s wrong with her. Therefore one can say that she is not a reliable narrator.