Murder In Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

Murder in the 1st degree

When was the last time you looked at someone and knew instantly that a person was insane? Is it not safe to assume when an individual shows us kindness and compassion we tend to believe he/she won’t harm us? It’s a scary thought that the people we interact with may not be who we think they are. In the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, I was introduced to a character known only as “Old Man”. The old man didn’t have any known enemies and he thought he was safe, until a madman sneaked into his bedroom.

When I think of human nature I think of the delicate balance between good and evil, right and wrong, and how and why an individual reaches their breaking point, which is why I came to appreciate the theme

I loved the fact that for the better part of this story the narrator tried to convince me that he wasn’t insane, and the reason that he was planning the murder was because of the evil eye. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the narrator decides to stalk to the old man every single night for a little over a week, waiting for the old man to open his eye. The narrator couldn’t kill the man until he saw the eye one last time. (Poe 230-231). As grotesque and gruesome it was, the climax of the story to me was the best. The narrator kills the old man with his own bed, cuts him into small pieces and sticks him under the floor planks. Poe has such a unique writing style that I wasn’t at all surprised how he used various literary elements to tell a story his own way, especially a disturbing murder.

“A Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe doesn’t seem like much from the outside, but it’s not until we look deep inside this writers mind that we begin to see how a person’s trouble mind can manifest itself into a horrific tragedy. Most of us will go through life without harming so much as a fly, but for serial killers like Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer the idea of murdering another human being is an exhilarating