The story “The Tell Tale Heart” written by Edgar Allan Poe is about one man that aims to convince the reader of his sanity while simultaneously describing a murder he committed. In the story the author entertains the audience of readers that enjoy the genre of horror. Horror is a genre of fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, disgust, or startle its readers by inducing feelings of terror. The main character of a horror story is very important and Poe creates an interesting one with a personality that constantly challenges the reader. In “The Tell Tale Heart”, the main character is the narrator and he, we would presume, is also unnamed. He had recently murdered his boss and is telling his view of the events. His main goal is to try to convince the reader of his sanity. His tone is excited, because he is mentally unstable. Through the story he continues to ask if we think he is mad and reminds us he is not. At the very beginning of the story he insists he is not. The first line of the story is, “True! - Nervous - Very very dreadful I had been and am; but why will you say I am mad?” (Poe 81) He is intensely nervous and already questions his readers. Poe then writes “The disease had sharpened my senses- not destroyed- not dulled.” (Poe 81) An insane person …show more content…
would be someone that lost all of their senses. The narrator also mentions an idea. Poe writes “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night.” (Poe 81) And his idea has turned into an obsession. The disease and idea the narrator has is the old man. It was his eye, Poe writes “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture - pale blue eyes.” (Poe 81) Whenever he saw the eye his blood ran cold. Eventually he could not handle it any longer and decided to get rid of the eye, thus killing the old man. The narrator has no reason to murder the old man. He even says “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.”(Poe 81) There has to be something wrong with this man. As a reader, this story made me question Why is killing the man your best option? You could just stop working for the old man? He compares his methods of murder to a madman, his argument, insane people do not have the skill or knowledge that he has. For example“ Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded with what caution with what foresight with what dissimulation.” (Poe 81) and “Would a madman have been so wise.” (Poe 82) The narrator tries to prove again he is not mad. From a reader’s stance, he is becoming more and more insane and losing credibility. Would an insane person be so cautious?
The narrator plans everything well and is extremely careful going along with the argument of his sanity. Poe writes “And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it-oh so gently!”(Poe 81) He peaked into the old man’s room carefully for seven straight nights with his lantern and on the eighth night he was even more careful. He says “Never before that night I felt the extent of my own powers - of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph.” (Poe 82) Showing his arrogance. But he accidentally woke up the old man. And Poe writes “ I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle.” (Poe
82) After the murder the narrator questions the readers once again He says “If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.” (Poe 83) He first cut up the head, arms, and legs, hid the body parts under the floor boards, and replaced the planks. There isn’t any blood on the floor, narrator is quite smart by cutting the body in the tub, leaving no mark of blood. How can someone be so careful and insane at the same time? Next, Poe’s character is created with arrogance, it can been seen when the police officers visit to investigate the home. After murdering the old man, chopping the body, and hiding it beneath the floor boards the police arrive, asking about a scream during the night. As he is showing the police around the house Poe writes,“In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought the chairs into the room and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.” (Poe 84) The narrator is so confident that he will get away with this murder, he sits in the chair directly above the body under the planks. He then believes he hears the heart of the old man beating and ultimately his arrogance leads panic which leads to his downfall, turning himself in. Would an a normal person have this much confidence planning and executing a murder? In Edgar Allan Poe’s other stories, he has characters similar to the narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart”. In the story “The Black Cat”, the narrator, unnamed, also begins insisting that he isn’t mad. Poe writes “Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not.” (Poe 115) The character has a similar sense of guilt, which doesn’t really exists and similar. Both narrators don’t believe they are criminals, they think what they’re doing is perfectly reasonable. Both stories have supernatural events occur, the heartbeat in “The Tell Tale Heart” and in “The Black Cat” the narrator sees the cat everywhere. In the story the “The Cask of Amontillado”, the character Montressor is also a murder like the two unnamed narrators. In the Cask of Amontillado the killer gives the reason of murder to be an insult. Like “The Tell Tale Heart”, the two characters have silly and strange motives for murder, the eye and an insult. The three stories have main characters that murder someone and bury them in a part of a their house in common. Poe sets a dark and gloomy mood in most of stories which sets the tone of the genre he writes. There is a psychological intensity found in Poe’s writings, especially in the three stories we have read. The article writes “These stories—which include “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche.” (Poetry Foundation Biography) These three articles foreshadow psychological realism. Poe’s narrator questions us about his sanity, it also drives us to think if he has other problems. For example, “Seeing him trying desperately to convince the reader that he is not insane only affirms the suspicion that he has a mental disease.” (Pereira 1) From an academic essay, the author believes the narrator shows signs of schizophrenia. The narrator wants to show he is sane and everything he done normal and reasonable, it is quite hard to see that come from a healthy mind. She writes about three behaviors that maybe considered symptoms of schizophrenia. First, the delusions he has during the story. For example, “They heard!- they suspected!-they knew! -they were making a mockery of my horror!” (Poe 84) The narrator is having referential delusions, which is when a person believes that certain gestures of actions are specifically directed at them. He believes the police know of his crime but they have yet to find out. Next the narrator has hallucinations. He hears the heart of the old man beating. “This shows that the hypersensitivity of senses the man thought to be a proof of his sanity was, in fact, his mind going crazy.” (Pereira 1) Lastly, the narrator displays catatonic behaviors, she writes “it can be either an extremely paralysis of the muscles of one’s body or an hyperactivity conduct, and this man presents both actions.” When he accidentally woke up the old man, he stood there for a whole hour and did not move a muscle. The author’s conclusion, the narrator is obviously showing signs of mental disease. In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe is successful in creating a character that induces some fright and scare into the reader. The character he creates is provocative and readers need to be examining his every line to figure him out.
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
Poe's narrator sees that he is a Master with good powers of observation.” There are some psychological issues with the narrator, there are instances where the narrator tells the reader if they think he is a mad man. “Why will you say I am mad” (Poe) the narrator is empathizing that as the reader, they are the ones who are wrong. The narrator believes that he is right; therefore, the heart beating and the eye watching him proves to him that he is not psychotic. While as the reader, they know that him murdering an innocent old man based upon his eye is in fact
In the first place, I fathom the narrator is insane because he is proven ill. For instance, there are many clues throughout “The Tell Tale Heart” that despite the
Hence, these two characters start to analyze their thoughts in a way where they become secluded from their state of mind and lose their sanity in the real world. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator realizes that he has no reason to kill the old man he lives with. He even starts to admit to having to love the man. He states, “There was no reason for what I did.
The irony in, “The Tell Tale Heart” is more obscure. The narrator is an insane and a man who has agitation, yet tries to persuade the reader that he is not just sane, but rather logical. He proves this by calmly explaining why the violent act happens, but only resulting in contrary to what is being influence to the readers. One of the act that takes place, was “every night, about midnight, [the narrator] turns the latch of [the old man’s] door and opened it ....It took [him] an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that [he] could see [the old man] as he lay upon his bed”. (1) It is abnormal enough for someone to speak repetitively, the narrator broke this boundary, in putting his somewhat mad plan into action. Another ironic moment was the need to confess his murder at the end of the story, due to guilt that is feeding on him alive. Though he is free of the judgmental eye, he is to be imprison for his
Many people who have read “The Tell Tale Heart,” argue whether or not the narrator is sane or insane. Throughout this paper I have mentioned the main reasons for the narrator being sane. The narrator experienced guilt, he also was very wary executing the plan, and the intelligence level of his plan to murder the old
Poe endured more than any individual should endure, and experienced so much negativity it was almost inevitable that the theme of insanity would appear in his works. He suffered from an excessive amount of hardships and tragedies throughout his life that placed him on the brink of insanity. The first sign of Poe’s insanity is found in his short story “The Black Cat” where the narrator claims “mad [he] is not”. Present in the state of denial, Poe’s character will say or do anything to relinquish the claim of ...
Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.
The story opens with the narrator explaining his sanity after murdering his companion. By immediately presenting the reader with the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator, Poe attempts to distort his audience’s perceptions from the beginning. This point is further emphasized by his focus on the perceived nexus of madness; the eye. Poe, through the narrator, compares the old man’s eye to the eye of a vulture. Because vultures are birds that prey on the weak and depend on their eyesight to hunt, it is easy to deduct that Poe’s intention is to connect the narrator’s guilt and his interpretation of events in his life. By equating the eye to the old man’s ability to see more than what others see, Poe allows the narrator to explore the idea that this eye can see his weakness; the evil that lies in the narrator’s heart and that which makes him unacceptable. Knowing that he is damaged makes the narrato...
Throughout the story, the Narrator shows several symptoms of schizophrenia, specifically the active phase of the disease. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, there are five main categories for the symptoms of schizophrenia: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior, and negative symptoms. The two main negative symptoms are reduced facial expressions and a decrease in motivation to participate in self-initiated activities (“Schizophrenia”). In his article “’Moral insanity’ or paranoid schizophrenia: Poe 's ‘The Tell-Tale
To begin the story Poe has a man who sets the scenery. The man sounds like he has a sound mind. But the narrator is trying to build his case for his sanity. The idea of the obsession that the narrator has with the eye of his employer builds to the question of whether or not this was a sign of a man who has an unstable mind or is it all just a ploy to get away with murder.
In the first lines of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the reader can tell that narrator is crazy, however the narrator claims the he is not crazy and is very much sane, because how could a crazy person come up with such a good plan. “How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observer how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story,” (Poe 74). The reader can see from this quote that narrator is claiming that he is not insane because he can tell anyone what happened without having a mental breakdown or any other problems that people associate with crazy people. This is the begging of the unreliability of the narrator. Here the reader is merely questioning the amount of details. The narrator then goes on to explain how he didn’t hate the old man but he hated his eye.
"Now this is the point. Your fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me"(42 Backpack Literature). Reading such words can create a wide imagination about what the character is truly like. The narrator in the story has an indirect personality where as you read you find out more and more about him.The narrator in Edger Allan Poe's "The Tell- Tale Heart" seems like he makes himself completely insane but as readers we are never told of any psychological problems, if any, that he may have.The characterization by Poe of the narrator crease a puzzle which makes the story interesting. I would characterize the narrator as being secretive, insane and nervous.
The behavior of the narrator in The Tell-Tale heart demonstrate characteristic that are associated with people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoid schizophrenia . When Poe wrote this story in 1843 obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia had not been discovered. However in modern times the characteristics demonstrated by the narrator leads people to believe that he has a mental illness. Poe’s narrator demonstrates classic signs throughout the story leading the reader to believe that this character is mad
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe is a short story that dives into the mind of an insane man. The story only features five characters. There is an old man with a blue eye, the crazed killer, and three police. The story is narrated by the nameless murderer. It is his attempt to justify his behavior and to prove to the reader that he is not crazy. As the story goes on you come to the realization that he is actually insane. The characters in this story are complex, interesting, and elaborate.