UNRELIABLE NARRATOR IN “THE TELL-TALE HEART” BY E.A. POE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2023.3.13Keywords:
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, unreliability types, unreliable narrator, homodiegetic stipulating narratorAbstract
This study investigates the degree of narrator’s unreliability in the mystical crime story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. The theoretical background of our research are the works by S. Rimmon-Kenan (2002), M. Jahn (2005), J. Jacke (2018), who examine the issues of narratology, unreliability and unreliable narrator in particular. J. Jacke correlates five types of unreliability (fact-related utterance unreliability, fact-related cognitive unreliability, value-related utterance unreliability, value-related cognitive unreliability, value-related actional unreliability) with four types of narrators (heterodiegetic, non-personal, all-knowing, stipulating). Our analysis of the content, structure, and linguistic features of “The Tell-Tale Heart” shows that its narrator can be classified as homodiegetic/stipulating. The story is first-person narration in the form of direct speech, the narrator is its main character; there are no deictic parameters, an addressee is not specified (a crime investigator? a psychiatrist?). These discourse characteristics allow a presumption that that the events described are a figment of the narrator’s sick consciousness. J. Jacke suggests that stipulating narrators can be one of the most unreliable; yet she adds that further research might be needed to support her theoretical assumption concerning the connection between the first four types of unreliability and the type of stipulating narrators. Our study proves that in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator is unreliable according to the parameters of all the five types of unreliability. Our main conclusions are as follows: first, the analysis of the story provides an evidence to support J. Jacke’s assumption that stipulating narrators may be one of the most unreliable types; second, we suggest an alternative interpretation of a famous story: the narrator’s unreliability may be determined by the fact that the events described did not happen in the fictional world of the story, but unfold in the narrator’s sick mind.
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