The Unreliable Narrator

Poe’s style of narration

One of my favorite elements of Poe’s writing is his use of an unreliable first person narrator.  Poe’s first-person narrative style allows the reader to get in to the mind of the narrator, who is very often the protagonist.  In first person narratives, we are often able trust the narrator while in Poe’s tales it seems that the narrator is almost always unreliable to some extent. 

This is especially evident in Poe’s  “The Tell-Tale Heart” where the narrator is attempting to convince us that he is sane while he is obviously crazy.  The narrator claims that his tale of murder confirms his sanity while it is clear it only supplies evidence of his madness.  The narrator explains that he hears the beating of the old man’s heart under the floorboards while it is clear that it is his own heart that is driving him mad. He carefully lays out an argument for his sanity, but as the story progresses, the only thing the narrator convinces the reader of is his madness.  I particularly enjoyed this story as it addresses some of the interesting characteristics of mental illness before much had been discovered in that field.  The narrator of the story exhibits signs of paranoia and it is impressive how Poe can get into the mind of an insane person without being insane himself (was he?).  Similarly in “Legeia”, the narrator’s use of opium makes us suspicious of his claims.  In my short story class last semester we read Poe’s tale “The Cask of Amontillado” where, like “The Tell-Tale heart”, the narrator explains a murder that he has committed.  The narrator often refers to his victim as his friend and it seems that he regrets the murder although he never explicitly states so.  This unreliability in the narrator’s word adds another layer to the story that would otherwise be difficult to display from another point of view.