Journal 26: Unreliable Narrator

In the story “ The Tell-Tale Heart”, the author used a mad man’s point of view to tell the story. At the beginning of the story, the mad man who is also the narrator, told the readers that how calm he is, but the readers know that is not true because the calm people somehow wouldn’t mention themselves are calm. Especially the narrator just killed an old man who loved him just because of his one eye looked like vulture’s. However, create a unreliable narrator makes the story more interesting. We can understand the narrator’s personality or condition through his or her words. The amusing part is, since the narrator is unreliable, the readers could try to find out the truth of the whole story, it must be some details hide in the word that both the narrator and the readers didn’t notice, but the author know there are! A famous Japaness movie called “ Rashomon”, based on a murder and rape in the forest happened to different characters. The movie is famous for having an unusual type of story. The same event was described by four different people who were involved in it, and they all said different things. At the end of the movie, it still didn’t tell the truth of the whole story, the audiences have to fing out by themselves.