The Boarded Window: Unreliable narrator

This may interest some of you regarding the narrator's unreliability in The Boarded Window. Taken from Rena Korb, Short Stories for Students:

The words he chooses to share, however, prove the narrator to be unreliable. He constantly contradicts himself, thus subverting his own authority. He says that “every well-informed boy” knew Murlock’s cabin to be haunted by a ghost, but he doesn’t say how this knowledge — which would imply that others in the region knew of what had taken place there — came to be universal. In actuality, any neighbors had little knowledge of the wife. As the narrator states, she had “preceded” her husband in death “by so many years that local tradition had retained hardly a hint of her existence”; in fact, there was no longer even any “known record of her name.” The narrator also repeatedly emphasizes the mystery of the evening in question, declaring of the boarded window of Murlock’s cabin, “nobody could remember a time when it was not [boarded up]. And none knew why it was so closed.” Almost immediately thereafter he confesses, “I fancy there are few persons living to-day who ever knew the secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.” Finally, he reveals how he came to be privy to the information: “But there is an earlier chapter — that supplied by my grandfather.” Thus essentially ends the role of the narrator. The rest of the story focuses on Murlock’s sad tale, and indeed ends without ever returning to the narrator.

Readers are left with the question: What is the narrator’s relation to Murlock? How does he come to know this information that no one else knows. While the narrator proposes an answer to this question — that his grandfather “had known him [Murlock] when living near by in that earlier day” — this answer is far from satisfactory. For the narrator has already described the land upon which Murlock lived as “surrounded on all sides by the great forest.” Indeed, when his wife fell ill, her care rested solely upon him because there “was no physician within miles, no neighbor.” How then, is the reader to believe that this man who elected to live, and die, in such isolation would choose to reveal his horrible story to a seemingly random person? It seems unlikely that he even has a neighbor.

A reader could likely conjecture that the narrator’s grandfather is in actuality Murlock: the narrator is privy to facts, details, and knowledge that it would appear no other living soul has, not only about the night of the panther, but about Murlock’s feelings and thoughts. The narrator explains Murlock’s lack of reaction to his wife’s death as due to the fact that “[H]e had no experience in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by its use. His heart could not contain it all, nor did his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go.” Of these statements, only the last could be construed from the life that Murlock went on to lead. Clearly, Murlock was devastated by the death of his wife, otherwise he would not have retreated into his isolated state. The narrator, however, presents no plausible explanation for his knowledge about how Murlock deals with grief. He even emphasizes his illogical authority when he says, “We may conceive Murlock to have been that way affected... (and here we are upon surer ground than that of conjecture).” The mystery of the narrator’s relation to Murlock is never answered in any satisfactory fashion. Readers are left to form their own opinion, based on a brief text and insubstantial evidence.