Annotation In The Tell Tale Heart

The Tell Tale Heart

In the story “The Tell Tale Heart”, the narrator seems to have a problem with an old man with whom he lives. To the surprise of the readers, the issue is not with the old man, but with one of his eyes. Yes, with one of his eyes “which resembled that of a vulture- a pale blue with a film over it” (403).According to the narrator, the old man’s eye possessed a potential threat to him. So, he eventually kills the old man just to get rid of his eye. His paranoiac imagination eventually brought him to a great depth of melancholy and motivated him to kill the old man. Although he begins his narration by expounding that he is neither mad nor insane, his story affirms that he is insane. In the beginning of his story, the narrator admits that he is a type of person who is disturbingly nervous. He reiterates that he can hear sounds and see things in heaven,

On the eighth night, just when he is about to enter the room, he accidently makes a little noise and the old man wakes up. The narrator gets furious when he sees the eye. He finally kills him. He then cuts the body into pieces and hide them under the loose boards in the floor. Smart enough, the narrator cuts the body in the bathtub in order to ensure that no blood remained in the floor. When the policemen arrived to talk to him about the scream heard by one of his neighbors, he talks to them nicely and tells them that the old man has gone to the town. The policemen were also unsuspicious about the whole incident. Even after carrying the whole plot so much effectively, he hears the sound of the dead man’s heartbeat and could not help himself but confess about the murder to the policemen. This shows that the mental condition of the narrator was