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Tone
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.
Here, he admits outright to hallucinations and wild fantasies that make it difficult for him to differentiate between visions and reality. Rather than being singular one-offs, these symptoms are so frequent that they seem to compose the entirety of his very existence. With a narrator so unsure of his surroundings, it is impossible to take what he says—about Berenice, about his feelings, about his very deeds—at face value.
Egaeus’s awareness of his unreliability adds to the growing sense of ambient horror in the story. He is trapped, doomed to recount what he can only uncertainly remember, in a tragedy of his own making, and this lack of control has a destabilizing effect on the narrative. Reader and narrator alike are fully aware from the start that something is wrong about the story, even as they are in the process of watching it unfold.
Related Themes:
