We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson
recounts the horrifying tale of Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood and her
family’s chaotic past. As a writer of experimental fiction, Jackson is to be
applauded for both her cleverness in subverting genre conventions and her
ability to portray Merricat as the unreliable protagonist.
First, Merricat’s role as the narrator is emblematic of
Jackson’s ability to subvert genre expectations. Traditionally, we would expect
the narrator to represent the story’s hero or at least some sort of positive
force in the plot. Furthermore, narrators in novels, through their actions and
personalities, frequently demand sympathy from readers. Effectively, we are
conditioned to want narrators to be the protagonists, the “good guys.” Jackson
takes a novel approach to this tradition in
We Have Always Lived in the
Castle by characterizing Merricat as the violent antagonist, but still
demanding of the reader’s compassion. In the back of our minds, we know that
some sort of poetic justice should occur for the antagonist, yet this is not
the case for Merricat. Instead, we often take pity in Merricat’s struggles. For
instance, once we know more about Cousin Charles, we eventually agree with
Merricat that “the house injured, would reject him by itself” (Jackson 78). Jackson
slyly forces readers into rooting for the bad guys.
Furthermore, Shirley Jackson is creative in blurring the
lines between truth and fiction. Because Merricat is the source of all
knowledge pertaining to this story, we must speculate whether or not her
account of the story is accurate. Joyce Carol Oates in an essay entitled
The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson voices
my sentiment that “Merricat taunts us with what she knows, and we don’t know;
her recounting of the tragic Blackwood family is piecemeal” (Oates). So in a
sense, Merricat is an unreliable narrator not because she feeds us distorted
information, but because she often has gaps in her accounts.
Therefore, Shirley Jackson is creative as she utilizes
Merricat as a vehicle for her fictional experiment of exploring genre
conventions and the reliability of the narrator.
Works Cited
Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: The Penguin Group, 2006. Print.
Oates, Joyce C. "The Witchcraft of Shirley Jackson." The New York Review of Books. NYREV, 8 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Feb. 2014.
Marcus, I really like your post on Merricat and our self-pity. Like most stories, the protagonist is someone with a positive attitude or has many qualities that are inviting to the reader. In the novel, Merricat is first introduced and then later on developed to a way that makes the reader feel pity for Merricat. However, in the ending the reader realizes that the loving Merricat is actually the mass murderer who killed almost all of her family, which leads me to your second point; How reliable is Merricat as a narrator? Just like you bring up, it is quite interesting to know that Merricat has the ability to toy with us readers due to our lack of knowledge on the subject at hand. However, I personally believe Merricat is a reliable narrator because I feel almost as if Merricat has an impartial attitude towards the novel's plot. In short, it is almost as if Merricat is simply transmitting all the information to the reader as the plot moves forward. Nonetheless, nothing can be specifically proven to show Merricat can be completely trusted in this novel, especially since she killed her family.
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