Exploring Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart

Edgar Allen Poe’s a genius of innovation. He uses the ideas that were common concerns of the time to revolve around in his short stories. Edgar Allen Poe grew up in a rough time with his parents died at a young age and was placed with a foster family in which he was treated without any respect. He took the ideas of mental illness to a sophisticated example in his short story, The Tell Tale Heart. The Tell Tale Heart is written in the gothic theme that helps set the surreal theme. Poe’s whole idea in the poem is to address the idea of mental illness.
To begin the story he has a man who sets out the scenery for the story. The man sounds like his is on the sound mind. The narrator builds a case of his sanity for the longest time. But the idea of the mind builds to where he is stuck in hatred for one item of a pleasant old man that annoyed the narrator that leads to his mind showing some illnesses.
But does this mental illness show weakness or is it a sophistical mind of a genius? This was the major question that is under tremendous debate amongst this idea. Through many discussions of Poe’s ways of writing this short story it lends hand to an idea that Poe might be expressing both views of the subject of mental illness. In pieces used by many people in different forms of media we see this idea being expressed in multiple forms.
To begin in The Tell Tale Heart the narrator brings up the question of his mental state, “TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” (Poe, 1938) This starts the discussion of whether the narrator is in his right mind or if he is not. Bynum thinks of Poe’s writing as the narrator being a man who is insane. This idea leads to the understanding tha...

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...o a professor at MIT, John Nash, who had schizophrenia be was able to develop one of the greatest theories that common day economic relies so heavily on. She shows that maybe the narrator is similar in that way that he is almost a genius in pulling off the crime that he had committed.
Zimmerman, B. "Frantic Forensic Oratory: Poe's The 'Tell-Tale Heart'." Style 35.1 (n.d.): 34-49. Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Zimmerman takes Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart, short story, in a fact of an oratory for a defense plea. Zimmerman goes to through the complexity of the writing and explains rather than this being a story it is a defense plea trying to convince the reader that the narrator is actually a mentally deranged man. He goes through the different steps in a defense statement and correlates each part to the story.