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The Spring Of Mental Illness In The Tell-Tale Heart

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The Spring of Mental Illness
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in five adults have a mental disorder. Mental illness can lead to being unaware, death, and an unreliable narrator. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe the narrator plans to murder a man with what he describes as a vulture eye and successfully kills him without any evidence left behind. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is about a woman who lives with postpartum depression and goes mentally insane due to lack of stimulation with people and the outside world. Lastly “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King is about a murderer who forgets he is killing. All three of these stories deal with narrators who suffer from a mental …show more content…

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is unreliable because she is unaware who she is and why she is in the room. “‘I’ve got out at last,’said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’”(Perkins Gilman 12). The narrator does not know who she is and refers to herself in the third person as Jane. she is also unaware that she was not stuck behind the wallpaper which most people would know is impossible. Springheel is more unreliable because, while the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is unaware of her condition and its causes, he murders people and does not know. When describing the night he committed a murder he describes the night as “For, me that was one of the most beautiful nights I can remember. The people I passed under the haloed streetlights were murmuring shadows, and all of them seemed to be lovers walking with hands and eyes linked”(King 3). The narrator describes the night as one of the most beautiful nights because in his mind shadows, melting snow, and a creepy setting is a place he enjoys, but all he knows is how he felt. This narrator is unreliable because no sane person would find the night as beautiful as he did. Also he unaware that what made the night so memorable was killing Ann Bray. As the killings continue, students are sent home early for spring break, Springheel describes the

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