Unreliable Narrator In The Tell-Tale Heart And Cathedral

Many times the narrator of a story is trusted and the reader gets very crucial information from him or her. But when the narrator turns out to be unreliable and the reader can’t really tell what’s true and untrue, it can get very hard to find the ‘truth’. Though an unreliable narrator make it very difficult to follow the story, along the way they usually ends up revealing more about themselves than they mean to. In the stories “The Tell Tale Heart” and “Cathedral”, the unreliable narrator really helps to characterize who the narrator really is although they both lead to different themes in the end.
Both stories, “The Tell Tale Heart and “Cathedral”, are written in the first person. Having this first person leads to some bias coming into all of the stories and making them seem unreliable to the …show more content…
The first person narration gives an interesting view on how the narrator sees what is going on. The first person gives the reader only the view of what that person is thinking and that person only. Since the reader only know what they are thinking, they get bias on every subject that is discussed throughout the entire story. They see everything how the narrator sees, hear everything how the narrator hears it, and feel everything how the narrator feels it. Through this, it gives the reader a one-sided lense on every subject discussed. If the narrator is reliable though, this can be a good thing. The reader can get important insight into how things work that might otherwise not be explained. But when the narrator is unreliable, there may be confusion on certain subjects and logic that might seem slightly insane.
Many times throughout the story “The Tell Tale Heart”, the narrator seems very deranged and believing that the man who he kills actually deserves to be killed just because of his eye. That is his only logic for taking a man’s life. He has great insanity that really makes reading the story hard and