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.
I agree with the quotations you used as the examples to prove that she is a unreliable narrator because throughout the whole story she always think that she is normal with no mental problem because she thinks she is just smarter than her family. She kind of living in her inner world which she rarely sees the outside world. Also in the story, the setting takes place mostly in the house and the bedroom with the yellow wallpaper. The house is like her world which she think she sees everything clearly in it. The most accurate thing to prove she is a unreliable narrator is when she said see herself trapped inside the yellow wallpaper and she wanted to free herself. This can tell us that her problems are not getting well that she thinks she is trapped in the wallpaper.
I happen to completely agree with your assessment of the narrator’s reliability and that it is completely untrustworthy. She is living in a world that is really a practical figment of her imagination because most of the things she sees can only be seen by her. Also at times she is almost childlike in her fascination with the wallpaper regressing in her mental capacity which is at question throughout the entire piece. In reality i don’t believe that she is right in the head. I mean it could be argued that she had the psychotic break because of the room but really the room was just that a room. She however reads into everything thereby becoming less sane as time goes by. In the end we see her crawling all over the room believing that she is part of the yellow wallpaper which is the final straw that convinces me that she is crazy and not a trustworthy narrator.