Andrews Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, where she teaches literature and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in literature, and regularly writes book reviews, historical articles, and literary criticism for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, Andrews Henningfeld examines the convention of the unreliable narrator in literature, focusing on the way Ellison both uses and subverts that convention in his story.

Harlan Ellison first published "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction, before using it as the title story in his 1967 collection I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. A horrifying and ghastly story of a post-apocalyptic hell controlled by a monster computer, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" attracted the attention of Ellison fans and critics alike, winning a Hugo award in...