Characteristics Of Edgar Allan Poe As An Unreliable Narrator

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Poe’s Narrators/ Unreliable Narrators
In Edgar Allan Poe’s stories there sometimes tends to be an unreliable narrator in the story. We can see that in his 3 stories “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “That Black Cat”, and “The Cask of Amontillado”. Those stories show characteristics of an unreliable narrator. We can mostly see it in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Everyone of Poe’s stories has a gruesome and traumatic ending which add on to that insane and unreliable sense. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator is a psychotic person. In “The Black Cat”, the narrator is a violet alcoholic. In “The Cast of Amontillado”, the narrator is a killer. The fact that they do all these terrible things to people make them an unreliable narrator. Even if the narrators didn’t do the terrible things they said they did, that would still make them untrustworthy and unreliable because then their lying to their readers. When a story has an unreliable narrator, you find that their narrating is not what is really happening. It can make you find out what’s really happening, and turns us into the narrators. Sometimes when we find out a narrator is unreliable it might make us understand the story better and understand out character better. In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator thinks there sane but is actually insane and psychotic. We see that because what the narrator thinks is a dead body’s heart beating is his own. In the story the narrator lives with an old man. The narrator thinks of the old man like a fatherly figure, but he doesn’t like his eye. He calls it the man’s “culture eye” and “evil eye”. After being traumatized by the eye for so long the narrator decides that the only way to get rid of the eye is to kill the old man and his eye, even though the narrator says about the man, “He had never wronged me. He has never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!” So, he didn’t want to kill the man just to kill him. It was to get rid of his evil eye! The old man’s “evil eye” is just a blind eye. That’s another example of why he’s an unreliable narrator. Then also when the narrator goes to kill him he claims that when he snuck into the old man’s room, “right before
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But that doesn’t mean that he’s trustworthy. He is a wealthy man that decides to attend a party with other wealthy people attending also. One of the narrator’s frenemies insult his family name which get our narrator, Montresor, angry and he wants revenge. That is his motive to kill him. Montresor decides to take his frenemy back to his house. Montresor lives over the catacombs so they go down there where no one is and the entire time he lures him in more and more with expensive, fine wine. When Montresor can get him in this small space in the wall, he chains him up and then puts a wall in front of the space to cover him and lock him in there forever. No one ever finds him, and Montresor was successful with his murder because his frenemy, Fortunato, does eventually die that night. Even of Montresor didn’t necessarily lie to us from what I know, he still killed someone and any narrator that kills someone and is unrelatable is

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