Question

Read the excerpt from "The Lady Maid's Bell." But that wasn’t the only queer thing in the house. The very next day I found out that Mrs. Brympton had no nurse; and then I asked Agnes about the woman I had seen in the passage the afternoon before. Agnes said she had seen no one, and I saw that she thought I was dreaming. To be sure, it was dusk when we went down the passage, and she had excused herself for not bringing a light; but I had seen the woman plain enough to know her again if we should meet. I decided that she must have been a friend of the cook’s, or of one of the other women servants: perhaps she had come down from town for a night’s visit, and the servants wanted it kept secret. Some ladies are very stiff about having their servants’ friends in the house overnight. At any rate, I made up my mind to ask no more questions. How does this excerpt support the idea that the story is told by an unreliable narrator?

Answer 1

How does this excerpt support the idea that the story is told by an unreliable narrator?

• It supports the idea that the story is told by an unreliable narrator because it has intratextual signs saying that the narrator is contradicting himself by showing that he or she does not remember the facts well. In the sentence, “Agnes said she had seen no one, and I saw that she thought I was dreaming” it is clearly stated the unreliability of the narrator, Agnes finds very unlikely that there was a woman the afternoon before, and thinks the narrator is not making proper sense of what he or she is saying. Another fact that shows the unreliability of the narrator is that it was dark when they went down the passage and they did not bring a light, so it is very unlikely that the narrator had seen anything.