The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman use of stream-of-consciousness narration in The Yellow Wallpaper gives readers a dramatic account of the narrators break from reality. I feel like her mental condition changes every time she wrote. At first, the changes are slight. In the first passage the narrator talks mostly of her illness, her husband, and the house they have rented. She speaks only briefly of the yellow wallpaper. In the second passage on page 396 the narrator tells of her attempts to get the room repapered but still gives descriptions of the house and her interaction with her husband. In the third passage the narrator says of the yellow paper "It dwells in my mind so" (Gilman 398). After this the rest of the passages are dominated by her obsession with the wallpaper. On page 402 she takes this obsession beyond what most people would consider healthy when she writes of a woman being “behind the pattern” and staying up at night to "watch developments". The sentence "I think the woman gets out in the daytime" (Gilman 403) shows just how sever the narrator's break from reality has become. At the beginning of the story I would have considered her a reliable narrator, but by the end her distrust in others and complete break from reality make her very unreliable.