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Unreliable Narrator
Explanation and Analysis—I Am Not Understood:
“Berenice” is written from the first-person point of view of its main character, Egaeus, whose mental illness makes his memory of the events leading up to Berenice’s violation suspect. That is to say, Egaeus is an unreliable narrator—the further his monomania progresses, the more care the reader must take in order to discern the truth of his words. Egaeus himself alerts readers to his own unreliability early in the story, describing the specific symptoms of his mental illness in the quote below:
The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
Related Themes:
