Strange Things That Really Do Happen — The Trial for Murder
By this point in the collection, the ground has shifted. We're fully in Dickens's uncanny register now, a murdered man appears to the narrator, and later to the jury trying his killer, steering the verdict from beyond the grave.
What makes it unsettling isn't just the ghost. It's the narrator himself. He insists, calmly and repeatedly, that he's a rational man simply describing what happened to him, and yet what happened to him is something no rational account can explain. He never once seems to notice the contradiction he's living inside.
Dickens gives us no way to resolve it either. The verdict lands as Guilty, the story ends, and the question of what actually happened, justice, coincidence, or something else entirely, is left standing exactly where it started.
Something to think about:
the narrator insists throughout that he's simply reporting facts as a rational man would. Do you believe that's really what he's doing, or is he the least reliable person in his own story?
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