Monday, August 24, 2009

In this excerpt from “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which sentence implies that the narrator is unreliable?(a) There...

The answer is definitely (d).


When we say that the narrator is unreliable, we mean that she doesn't have the cognitive or emotional ability to notice the exact, full truth of what's going on and to express that truth. 


In other words, an unreliable narrator has some mental or emotional disturbance that warps how she perceives reality and/or how she expresses what she perceives. It's also the case sometimes that an unreliable narrator is just too young or naive to notice and process what's happening around her, like with the innocent Scout who narrates To Kill a Mockingbird.


But the narrator in question is an adult. In this case, Jane, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper," has been suffering from serious depression, and her condition has been made worse by the stifling conditions she's in. That is, she's forced to stay a prisoner in the nursery of the vacation home, doing nothing productive with her mind or body. Who wouldn't go nuts in that situation?


Sentence (d) reports a "figure," or some kind of person or creature, who "skulks" behind the pattern of the wallpaper. That kind of thing happens in a hallucination, not in real life. So that's how we know that this sentence, specifically, reveals the unreliable nature of the narrator.


If you look at the other three sentences, they offer only factual information and reasonable comments. 

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