We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Merricat serves as a classic example of an unreliable narrator. Her narration of events is marked by several important omissions, reflecting her inability to come to terms with her own violent and irrational actions. Notably, she never openly acknowledges her responsibility for the murders of her family members except in two brief conversations with Constance in the final chapters of the novel. Though she does not appear to openly lie in her narration, she nevertheless describes the trial and acquittal of Constance without addressing her own actions on the night of the murders. Similarly, she minimized her own responsibility for the fire that destroys much of the Blackwood family home. After sweeping Charles’s pipe off a table, she notes: 

I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented. I had reached the staircase to go downstairs before I remembered and had to go back to wash, and comb my hair. “What took you so long?” he asked when I sat down at the table. “What have you been doing up there?”

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