Perspective Used for Short Stories

Yellow Wallpaper The author of this report has been asked to review and write a reaction to the short story that has come to be known as The Yellow Wallpaper. The work is a short story that is about six thousand words in length. As with many short stories of this nature, the root goal and perspective that one can glean from the story really depends on how one chooses to look at it.

One can take it literally word for word while others could see flavors of feminism and the like. The author of this paper will specifically look at the reliability of the narrator. Specifically, it will be assessed how reliable the narrator is. While the short story is ostensibly a first-hand account of the story to be told and thus should be reliable, there are obviously some feelings and perceptions that are colored by emotions and other factors.

Analysis As noted in the introduction, the narrator herself is obviously a good general source of reliability and knowledge because that person is presumably just repeating what they say. However, there are still two fundamental flaws in that logic even with that being the case. First, so much of a person's movement and feelings in this world are based on presumptions and feelings. So often, those feelings are misguided or simply incorrect. Second of all, these feelings are obviously going to influence the perspective from which the story is told.

However, this second flaw goes a bit deeper, perhaps, in that these perceptions and reports about what is being observed could be intentionally skewed and massaged in a way to make the story more intriguing. The point is that taking the narrator's word what is and has happened is not the best idea as they may not being honest, they may not be perceiving things correctly and, most importantly, there is a story being told.

When it comes to the latter point, there is clearly a separation and a difference between an author telling a story like this and how a regular person would perceive and react to the same event (Gilman, 2005). The reliability of the narrator is actually undermined a bit by the words in the work itself. For example, the stanzas and statements at the very onset of the work make it clear that the narrator is the wife and she is recounting an experience with that husband.

She specifically notes that John is "practical to the extreme." She further says that he "has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and see and put down in figures." It is further noted that he is a physician, so this perhaps informs why he feels and thinks that way. It becomes clearly throughout the story that the narrator is quite the opposite.

As for how this impacts reliability, this would obviously come down to the perspective of the author. As one proceeds going through the story, it becomes quite clear that the author is becoming detached from reality. She starts engaging in sneaky behavior such as spying on her husband and listening to the conversations of others in the story. It gets to the point where she also starts making to imaginary "creeping women" and this is somehow correlated to the wallpaper. Of course, it has to be.