Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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Does a truly mad man have the ability to create a conniving, twisted scheme so that he may take the life of another? The answer to this question is, yes. In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, it is evident that the protagonist, the madman, is mentally unstable. He is overly confident in his plan to murder the old man; and, he is even delighted to commit such a gruesome crime with a smile on his face. (39) The majority of people, including myself, would think that no sane human being could awfully kill an innocent man. The madman’s only reasoning is that the elderly man’s eye resembled that of a vulture, and was “evil”. (37) Even after the crime was accomplished, it seems that the madman, still, had a smile on his face with no regret of the disgusting incident. However, later, when the policemen arrived and questioned the madman, the guilt started eating at him and he spilled out the entire truth. (39-40) Because of this extremely unpredictable outburst of an ending, the narrative greatly impressed me. …show more content…

I suppose he wanted to inspire his readers to see that the truth always reveals itself (still in drastic situations). The madman tried very hard to get away with murder; he thought his actions were untraceable. Because he performed such a deceiving yet convincing lie, the readers probably thought that the madman would succeed in his obscene measures; however, when he frantically divulged with honesty in the end, the readers were shocked because the entire story changed and with that, so did the readers’ perception. Therefore, I believe that Poe was very creative when writing this narrative; he somehow managed to do the near-impossible – Poe created a high moral effect through an evil story. I assume that there lies an even deeper message through the narrative: good can always come out of

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