Abstract
"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane are two short stories which, beyond the colour references in the title, try to develop certain psychological responses within the reader. I will attempt to show how through two different points of view for narration and other sharp differences, they actually challenge the same psychological question for the reader. The issues of narration, solitary and collective perspectives and conflicts, obsession, mood shifts and rise of madness, "genderization" and open conclusions will be discussed. Readers' responses to a text are very influenced by the narration. In "The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story is a first person narration. Moreover, the narrator is homodiegetic, in other terms, she belongs to the story, and she is even the protagonist. Since the readers perceive the text only through her eyes, she becomes very influential. In "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane, it is a regular third person narration in which the narrator is heterodiegetic, that is to say that he or she (although/but there are some clues for a masculine voice) does not belong to the story. Though it will be seen that, even with this seemingly "detached" narration, the opinion of the narrator can influence the reading of the text. With the point of view comes the question of the reliability that the readers have in the narrator.
