The Yellow Wallpaper

HOW DOES THE FIRST PERSON NARRATION OF THE YELLOW WALL PAPER CONTRIBUTE TO THE THEME OF THE STORY?

how does the first person narration help with the telling of the story

 

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I suppose if you really want to go into the mind of someone who has gone bonkers, it is best to view it from their point of view. We enter the narrator's anxieties and begin to understand her life a little. We can see that she is married to a jerk. To be more specific John is a physician who patronizingly dismisses his wife as a neurotic in need of rest. Rest is the last thing that she needs. We see that she is an artist doomed to a life of idle emptiness. The narrator’s point of view helps us put her in context as she buys a one way ticket to crazy town. After being locked in the room for her "rest and relaxation" the narrator becomes less and less reliable. This is both good and bad. It is good because we get to experience; briefly thank God, her decent into madness. First person becomes a problem because we never really know what the hell is going on. We lose our bearings along with our protagonist. All we really know is that she is going crazy; the more intricate details of her decent elude us. The reader is left to speculate about quite a bit. At least she gets to step on her husband in the end; that was satisfying!