Unreliable Narrator in Short Stories
Browse our curated collection of short stories featuring unreliable narrator with literary analysis and discussion guides.
The Tell-Tale Heart
An unnamed narrator insists upon their sanity while describing the methodical killing of an old man. Driven mad by the old man's "vulture eye," the narrator commits the act with precision, dismembers the body, and hides it beneath the floorboards. When police arrive, the narrator's guilt manifests as an unbearable phantom heartbeat, leading to a confession.
The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor, nursing a grudge over an unspecified insult, lures his acquaintance Fortunato deep into underground catacombs during carnival season under the pretense of evaluating a rare cask of Amontillado sherry. Exploiting Fortunato's pride as a wine connoisseur and his drunken state, Montresor chains him inside a narrow recess and methodically walls him in with stone and mortar, entombing him alive. Fifty years later, Montresor recounts the crime, and the remains have never been found.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer, stands on the Owl Creek bridge about to be hanged by Union soldiers. A flashback reveals he was tricked by a disguised Federal scout into attempting to burn the bridge. At the moment of execution, Farquhar appears to escape: the rope breaks, he plunges into the creek, evades gunfire, and treks through the wilderness toward home. Just as he reaches his wife, the narrative reveals the entire escape was a dying hallucination — Farquhar hangs dead from the bridge, his neck broken.
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman suffering from what her physician husband John calls a 'temporary nervous depression' is confined for a summer to an upstairs room and forbidden to work or write. Denied any outlet, she becomes fixated on the room's sickly yellow wallpaper. In secret journal entries she begins to see a woman trapped and creeping behind the pattern, and gradually identifies with her. By the end she has torn the paper from the walls to 'free' the trapped woman - and, creeping around the locked room, has slipped entirely into madness.
The Black Cat
A once gentle, animal-loving man descends into alcoholism and cruelty. He mutilates and then hangs his beloved black cat, Pluto; that night his house burns, leaving the image of a hanged cat scorched on a wall. He takes in a second, similar cat whose white patch grows into the shape of a gallows, and his hatred of it deepens. Trying to kill the animal with an axe, he buries the blade in his wife's skull instead and walls her corpse in the cellar. Confident he is safe, he raps on the wall for the visiting police - and a wailing cry answers from within: he has entombed the cat alive with the body, and its voice sends him to the gallows.