Analysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper: Undermining The Truth

The Yellow Wallpaper: Undermining the Truth It’s no secret that gothic stories often use a combination of physical and psychological terror to evoke emotion into the reader. In The Yellow Wallpaper the combination of physical confinement in the room and emotional oppression serve to accelerate the deterioration of the narrator’s sanity. This creates an unreliable narrator which undermines the truth and adds to the gothic of the story. An intangible and uncertain reality makes the reader question the events and characters and creates a sense of uneasiness.
The beginning of the story has a relatively reliable narrator, nothing that is said or explained in these early paragraphs seem to hint that there is anything awry with reality or of the retelling of the story by the narrator. These early paragraphs also lay out the relationship between the narrator and the husband. The narrator’s condition is introduced as well as the remedy that is prescribed by her husband, and her physician “[I] am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well
She starts seeing a figure inside the wall paper and this is the point when the narrator becomes unreliable. “And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder -- I begin to think – I wish John would take me away from here!”(Gilman 5). Once a figure shows up within the wall paper the narrator becomes unreliable because there isn’t actually a person there she’s just seeing a manifestation of her oppressed imagination. Immediately after seeing the woman behind the wallpaper she blames John and the place she is trapped in. There is an underlying truth in these words that show how the room and the yellow wall paper are to blame for the appearance of the woman when she says, “I wonder—I begin to