The Unreliable Narrator

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me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind. As if I couldn’t see through him!” (Perkins-Gilman, 1899). This sudden change in opinion makes the reader question how reliable she is. John may have been a bad husband all along, but the reader would not have known because the narrator saw him differently at the time.

As the story goes on, the narrator becomes more unreliable and untrustworthy. In her diary, she sometimes will express information about her husband John and sister-in-law Jennie that may go unnoticed to the readers. From the quote, “I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I’ve caught him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on in once.” (Perkins-Gilman, 1899), this demonstrates to the reader that John and Jennie may have been looking at the wallpaper in an unusual way. This makes the reader rely on the narrator for the correct information. There could be more to this than the narrator is willing to write about.

The narrator’s mental illness is another reason for her to be unreliable. Eventually, near the end of the story, her insanity is becoming quite apparent and others around her are starting to notice. She spends all her time studying the wallpaper trying to figure it out, losing all interest in anything else. This is where the reader can see how the dominance of her husband intensifies her obsession with the wallpaper and her descent into madness. The narrator’s husband continues to treat her as a frail child and the isolation that she suffers pushes her further into her delusions. Finally, although the shift is very subtle, the moment of her insanity is fully revealed in just one line, “…there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” (Perkins-Gilman, 1899). At the end, it is no longer some woman whom she must let out and trap but it is herself that is trapped. The narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper proves that her mental health is not stable making her an unreliable narrator.