The King in Yellow

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health.

Several the stories make use of the unreliable narrator as a literary device to add tension to the story. This literary device is one in which the point-of-view character or first-person narrator is in some way untrustworthy or unreliable in their telling of the story. The unreliability of a narrator is inherent first-person narratives and this unreliability can be heighted by suggestions that the character is actively lying in their narrative or misunderstands their own circumstances in some way.

In the case of both “The Repairer of Reputations,” and “In the Court of the Dragon,” the first-person narrator through whom the reader receives the story is unreliable due to possible mental incapacity. These point-of-view characters have read the play, The King in Yellow, which drives its readers “mad,” according to the lore established within the stories. Both Castaigne and the unnamed narrator of “In the Court of the Dragon,” may be experiencing a break from reality or at the very least, have a skewed perception of the events that take place in the story. Because of this, every event in the story is called into question and the reader cannot know for sure what is real and what is not.