When discussing the reliability of a narrator within a novel, you need to consider the way the story is structured. To spot errors in a narrator's statements, you need to pay attention to the elaborations. While in Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing" we are given a narrator who is the mother of some children who describes her feelings and life with her eldest daughter, Emily. As impartial as his words may seem at first, he still tells the story from his point of view. To identify an unreliable narrative, we need to examine three key aspects within the story. You need to find out if the narrator has any detectable biases, if the author contradicts himself, and finally you need to make sure that the reader is able to identify an unreliable narrator and interpret the story as crudely as possible. Regardless of how sincere the narrator in "I Stand Here Ironing" may seem, she is still an unreliable source of information. As a reader, it's important to understand exactly what you're reading. Watching the narrator in “I Stand Here Ironing,” it is easy to imagine a young woman who has been thrown a curve ball by life. After Emily's father leaves them, Emily's mother must find jobs to support her and her daughter. Although we don't know, it seems likely that the narrator is hiding the reason why she and Emily's father separated. Although she cites him as “no longer [able to] bear to share the need with us.” we readers are not provided with any additional information. His inability to provide any meaningful details makes it difficult to decide whether our narrator is really being totally honest with us. He claims that he left Emily with a woman in the same apartment building "for whom it was no miracle at all," implying that this woman had...half the paperwork...out of her life. The other sees her as someone so focused on making everything perfect that she leads her daughter to imperfection and early adulthood. An experienced reader will find only a small challenge in the process of identifying an unreliable narrator. All in all it's no surprise that the mother and narrator of "I Stand Here Ironing" is unreliable as a narrator. She is emotionally attached and prejudiced towards the world around her and her daughter's world. As a result, it ends up endangering their relationship and the two grow old and end up living under the same roof, but not in the same house. Its unreliability is caused by its distorted view of the world, its contradictory statements, and how deeply disguised the notion of its falsity is. As well-intentioned as she may have been, she was false and as such can be labeled an unreliable narrator.