Topic
Discuss the
reliability of the narrator. Should we
trust him? What effect does this choice
of narrator have on the telling of the story?
We see the story from the narrator’s point of view. Discuss the dramatic irony found in the
story. Compare what he believes about
himself compared to what we know about him.
The three stories we read for class
all had something in common. The story
was told to us by a first person narrator.
In real life, when someone is telling us a story, we either know the
person or we can get a sense of the reliability of the person as he/she tells
us the story. We can look at facial
expressions or listen to the tone of voice.
Can we trust the person in front of us?
But the narrators of these three stories are not in front of us.
Moreover, the stories they tell as so fantastical that it is hard to know if
they are telling the truth or not. How
can we determine if they are reliable?
Even though the stories are
fiction, the narrator is expected to be truthful. Right? Not always. In this essay I will be proving that, not
only are two of the narrators unreliable, in one of the stories the narrator
might be making up the whole story! I
will also be discussing what effects having an unreliable narrator can have on
a story.
Tell Tale Heart is the clearest story of an unreliable
narrator.
Things he says.
Things he does.
Things he believes.
The way others see the narrator.
The way he sees himself.
Effects of insane narrator.
(There is easily two paragraphs
worth of example for this story.)
The narrator in The Cask of Amontillado is a little tougher
to determine.
The clues are harder to find.
I do think he has quite a grudge.
Is he insane? Does he have to
be? Would it change the story?
Is the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum reliable?
Can we trust what he is telling us
is true?
If dramatic irony is what caused
the tension in TTH, then what causes tension in this story?
Conclusion that imitates the introduction.
If we know that the narrator is
unreliable as we read the story, the effect produced is dramatic irony: as he
tells the story from his view point, we catch glimpses that there is another
view point- sanity. The tension between
these two extremes makes the stories so scary
