The Old Man Is The Tell Tale Heart Insane

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Poe’s 1843 work, “The Tell Tale Heart,” is another murder story that details the torment of an innocent man by playing on the man’s fear of death. In this work, Poe points out the ironies of life and details emotional discontinuity that follow his personal life. The narrator becomes obsessed with an old man’s strange eye and vows to kill the man in order to quiet his obsession, although the man is, to the reader’s knowledge, innocent. The narrator rambles, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe “The Tell Tale Heart”). The narrator is portrayed as insane, as his irrational decisions cause him to act upon an innocent man. …show more content…

The heartbeat is also a representation of the old man’s paranoia: “It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme!” (Poe “The Tell Tale Heart”). Poe also acknowledges his own sense of mortality through the repetition of the heartbeat – his time is also running out. The narrator controls the man’s fear, continuously and intentionally taunting him with death, knowing that this terrifies him. However, the narrator attempts to excuse his actions from those of a mentally unstable man, stating: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded --with what caution --with what foresight […]! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him” (Poe “The Tell Tale Heart”). Unlike in “The Cask of Amontillado,” where Montresor remained calm and articulate, the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” is portrayed as

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