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Unreliable Narrator In The Black Cat, By Edgar Allan Poe

808 Words4 Pages

“I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” (The Black Cat 116) In "The Black Cat” this example shows that the narrator is crazy because he cut a cat's eye out for no reason. Poe's use of unreliable first person narrators affects the reception of his stories by knowing what the narrator knows, readers do not know if the narrators are lying, and they could be blowing things out of proportion. In many of Poe’s short stories the reader only gets to know what the narrator knows because someone in the story is telling it instead of someone outside the story so the reader cannot see every side. This technique makes it seem like everything the narrator does is for a good reason …show more content…

One instance this happened was in “The Tell Tale Heart” after he put him under the floorboard he started to hear a noise coming from under the floorboard but the cops didn't notice it. He could have been lying because no one knows if he was actually hearing the noise. Also the reader does not know if the cops actually didn't notice the noise or if they were acting like they didn’t hear it (84). The narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado” could have also been lying when he tried to kill the cat with an axe and somehow his wife just got in the way because the reader does not know if he actually wanted to kill his wife or not. In "The Black Cat" the narrator is not reliable because he could be lying about how much his temper really changed along with if the cat was actually doing anything or if he just said that so it wouldn't sound as bad that he cut its eye out. The readers are unaware if the narrators in Poe’s stories are reliable because they could be lying about things that happened. Along with not knowing if the narrators are lying the readers would not know if they are blowing things out of proportion or

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