Comparing 'The Yellow Wallpaper And Tell-Tale Heart'

A mental health patient, a crazed murderer, and an amnesiac murderer; sounds like a recipe for disaster. This interesting crowd here are all narrators in the three stories that we read, all of them undoubtedly being unreliable narrators. “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about a woman with a mental health problem who has moved into a new house and is prescribed rest almost all hours of the day in her room, throughout the story we see an unfolding of her mental breakdown. “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is about a madman (as the narrator himself puts it) who is driven to kill an old man just because he despises the old man's eye. “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King is about a college student who kills a woman every time …show more content…
Although the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is constantly being suppressed, she at least remembers everything that happens to her, unlike the narrator from “Strawberry Spring”. The narrator from “Strawberry Spring” forgot many nights throughout the story, and in the end, we find out he was murdering women during these forgotten nights. Since the narrator in “Strawberry Spring” completely forgot those nights he wasn't able to tell us what happened, leaving out chunks of the story that we will never know the details about. A narrator needs to remember what has happened to them to be reliable and tell us what has happened to them. But the narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” is still more unreliable. She does remember everything that happens to her throughout the story, but since she is constantly being suppressed, what she is telling us may not even be real and it is what others have told her to think. “You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?” From this quote from “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator believes that the reason she is not getting better is because her husband John is a physician, and John does not believe she is sick. This is a perfect example of John suppressing the narrator into believing what he wants her to think. A quote from “The Yellow Wallpaper”: “There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.” If John doesn't like her to write, she may be afraid that he will find her writings so she is being careful as to what she is writing. How do we even know what she is writing is true if John is so serious about her not writing? We never know if what the narrator