One of the devices which characterises the gothic genre is the presence of an unreliable narrator. Explore the ways which we could class this narrator as ‘unreliable.’ Use quotes from the text to support your observations. Consider why Poe has made the choice to craft this narrator as ‘unreliable.’ What does it bring to the text?

The narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart is a fairly unreliable source of information for the reader’s understanding of the story’s plot. With a bias rooted in proclaiming their innocence, the character presents the tale through their limited perspective of being inside the story.

As a first person story teller, they write/speak in a very personal way, directly to the reader. From the very beginning, you can already sense their strongly paranoid tone, “How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” It is very apparent that this character has some kind of desperation to prove their innocence before we have even assumed any wrongdoing on their behalf. This kind of paranoid behaviour in the language, paired with the obvious fact that they turn out to be a murderer, convinces us that this person has a motive to persuade us/themselves of their innocence.

In the second paragraph, the narrator goes on to manipulate the reader’s initial impressions of them by adding, “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire… .” It is very clear to see here that the narrator is trying to bargain with the reader’s first impressions of them before they go into detailing. In class discussion, this clever set up ended up making some feel sorry for the poor character, so tormented by their own perception of reality that they were lead to premeditated killing of one that they loved. Hence, we must not mark this narrator as reliable in most capacities: they have ulterior motives and therefore are willing to manipulate the truth to come off as ‘less deranged.’ I suppose that this did go quite well, well… until the very end.