Narrator and point of view

“Death by Scrabble” by Charlie Fish is a short story told by a first-person narrator who is also the protagonist of the short story. As usual, in the case of a first-person narrator, we must ask ourselves whether the narrator is reliable or not. Because the man proves to be quite impulsive and paranoid regarding the Scrabble tiles, we can deem him as mentally unstable. This idea is reinforced by the fact that he visualizes killing his wife in different ways and by his obsessive habit of chewing on the Scrabble tiles to release energy in a non-violent manner. All these elements make the husband an unreliable narrator.

The narrator has limited knowledge on what happens around him and only renders the events as he sees them. For example, neither he nor the readers know the wife’s real intentio...