In literature, the very first impression a reader gets of a text is through its narration. The narrator’s emotions, reliability, and presence in the story all contribute to how a reader interprets the meaning of a text. In Frankenstein, the narrator of the main portion of the novel is Victor, whose lack of foresight in reanimating the creature causes him significant duress later in the story. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator is unnamed, but is important to the story due to his crazed murder of an old man. Both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” utilize an unreliable first-person narrator to illustrate their characters’ madness.

The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” immediately hints at his insanity to the reader, while Frankenstein reveals the character’s madness more slowly. Poe’s narrator starts by asking his audience, “why will you say that I am mad? The disease has sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled them” (Poe 3). The narrator admits that the reader or audience might think that he is mad, but pushes back, saying that whatever has happened to him only improved his intellect. Due to this, the story sets the reader up to expect unreliable information and a biased perspective from the narration. Later, the narrator continues to reveal his unreliability: “[b]ut the beating grew louder, louder! … the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man’s hour had come!” (Poe 6). The narrator explains what finally led him to carry out the action of killing the old man, saying that, after he heard the old man’s heart beating from across the room, he worried that a neighbor would hear it and grow suspicious; therefore, the narrator finally carried out the murder. It is very unlikely that the narrator is able to hear the old man’s heartbeat, let alone someone in a neighboring house, but the narrator’s madness causes him to convince himself of the loudness of the heartbeat. Due to the first-person perspective, the reader is able to see inside the narrator’s head and understand his “reasoning.” Similarly, Frankenstein uses first-person narration to reveal how Victor’s paranoia impacts his actions. Immediately after the creature awakes, Victor becomes convinced that he is in danger and thinks that, “one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped” (Shelley 54). Victor instantly assumes that the creature’s natural reaction to reach out to his creator was one of violence, though he has nothing to support this presupposition. This is an apt example of Victor’s madness, which is made clearer to the reader by the use of first-person perspective. Later in the story, Victor describes his meeting with the creature. He recalls asking the creature, “‘[s]hall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world” (Shelley 148). Again, Victor has no basis for this extreme view of the creature. However, the reader is able to understand why he would make such rash judgments and become imbued with madness because of the novel’s first-person point of view. This perspective gives readers insight into the workings of Victor’s mind, making it a more effective way of revealing his unstable state of mind. The use of first-person narration allows for unreliability in both texts, as the narrator can present facts in the manner he views them, whereas an omniscient narrator is likely to present facts in exactly the way they happened.

In both Frankenstein and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” authors Shelley and Poe convey characters’ madness through the use of unreliable first-person narration. While Frankenstein’s usage of unreliable narrators is more subtle than that in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the technique provides both texts with increased authenticity, as neither author shies away from revealing characters’ flaws. Narration is crucial to any story because it shapes readers’ perspectives, so consideration of how authors utilize this device is important to understanding their overarching meaning for any text.