Guilt In Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allen Poe

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To begin with, In the short story Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe The narrator murdered an elderly man because he was mentally ill and extremely bothered by his "vulture eye." In reality, this "vulture eye" The narrator spends most of the story trying to convince the audience that he is a perfectly sane person. He is convinced he committed the perfect crime and that no one would know of what he had done to an innocent old man. The narrator is evil and found it in himself to disassemble a mans body and hide him under the floorboards due to his own sick obsession about his eye. The eye in this story symbolizes a part of the narrators identity he refuses to confront. In the text it states the narrator compares it to a vulture. Moreover, The …show more content…

The theme here is how guilt can drive a person mad and have them confess to their sins even though they are almost off the hook. The narrator felt the extreme emotion of guilt and no matter what his mental state he could not get away from it. Through out the text maybe the beating heart is his own and he was not as calm as he tried to persuade both readers and himself he was. He experiences a great deal of moral dillema. He is aware that murder is wrong and he says he is fond of the old man. At the end of the story, On page 55, the narrator states," And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!- no, no! They heard! They suspected! They knew!- They were making a mockery of horror! This I thought and this I think. But anything was better than this agony!Anything was more tolerable than this decision." This shows, how paranoid the narrator was because he had almost gotten completely away with murder. The moral dillema is that even the mentally ill can feel basic human emotion. I believe the author wants us to debate on the insanity of the narrator. As a reader, I believe the narrator is insane and smart, but not as smart as he thinks. He forgets that he has morals that shine through the status of his insanity. "Tell Tale heart" is an example of a parable used to express the dangers of a guilty conchence at an extreme

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