The Narrator Is The Tell Tale Heart Insane

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Edgar Allan Poe is notorious for his short horror stories, like the story “The Tell Tale Heart”. This story in particular has a very strange character in it who isn't easy to understand. He narrates the story of an old man's eye that drove him to murder. He constantly tries to prove how “intelligent” he is by bringing up examples of things he did that seem to him like they are smart, which makes him sound even more irrational. All this leads me to thinks that in the story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator is insane. Firstly, the narrator repeatedly tried to sway the reader to believe that he is not foolish and actually is very wise. When he tried to convince the reader this, he just comes across as even more insane by the way he words what he says. For example, the narrator stated, “The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” Clearly the narrator is hearing voices. This reveals to the reader that he is mad, because a sane person would not claim to hear things from heaven and …show more content…

The old man in the story “The Tale-Tell Heart” has a strange pale-blue eye that the narrator is generally afraid of. The story said, “He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” The narrator stated in the story before that he loved the old man, yet he wished him dead because of of much his eye disturbed him. Any fair-minded person would not be afraid of someone’s eye, and certainly would not want someone dead because of a silly fear. The narrator thinks like sociopath, he wants someone to die because he is disturbed by someone’s eye. This proves to the reader that the narrator is

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