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Merricat is an unusual, somewhat off-putting young woman. She craves isolation, desiring only the company of her sister Constance, and is given to violent impulses. She imagines various grotesque scenarios involving the villagers’ deaths when she encounters them in town and they ostracize and gossip about her. It’s not difficult, then, to imagine Merricat giving herself over to one of these violent impulses and poisoning her family.

The reason why remains unclear—perhaps it was because her mother and father sent her to bed without supper, as Merricat implies when Charles threatens to do the same. She appears fixated on punishment and the idea that she is above it, fantasizing about her family praising her and giving her anything she wants. However, it’s also possible the reason isn’t quite as straightforward as that, given that she also poisoned her aunt, uncle, and ten-year-old brother. Jackson leaves Merricat’s motivations ambiguous; the only thing we know for certain in the end is that Merricat poisoned them, and Constance knew the whole time.

At eighteen years old, Merricat still acts like a child in many ways, conceptualizing life as a board game to render errands more bearable and throwing tantrums when she doesn’t get her way. There is even something juvenile about her hatred of the villagers; they have always hated the Blackwoods, so she hates them back. Indeed, Merricat’s hatred is tinged with class consciousness she evidently learned from her parents; her father called the townspeople “trash,” and put up a gate at his wife’s request so she wouldn’t have to see “common people” passing by their property. In this same vein, Merricat cites the villagers’ ugly, dirty houses, juxtaposing them against the finery of the Blackwood and Rochester homes, and considers the idea that the village was built without much care to provide housing for “the drab and the unpleasant.”

Because of her animosity toward anyone other than Constance and her childlike perception of the world, Merricat is an unreliable narrator. She assumes she and Constance are of one mind about their isolation, so when Constance begins showing signs of wanting to reintegrate into society, Merricat feels betrayed. She never describes the family’s deaths or admits responsibility to herself, only to Constance when prompted, and she describes the fire she starts in Charles’s room with a degree of detachment, like it’s merely an event she is observing rather than one she caused. Ultimately, at the story’s end, Merricat gets the life she always wanted—one in which it is just her and Constance, cooking and eating and avoiding other people, as isolated as if they really were on the moon.

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