Theme Of Madness In The Tell Tale Heart

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Recommended: Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ elements

Do we truly ever know if one is mad? Madness is the driving force that tears away at our souls and makes us assess our deepest nightmares. It is the fears and terrors that will tip us over the edge of this imaginative level of insanity. Edgar Allen Poe often wrote many murderous and gruesome stories that would influence the reader to contemplate the bigger ideas in life. “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by Poe in 1843, is one of the most well known short stories from his time that explores the hidden qualities of an unknown narrator who attempts to convince the readers of his saneness. Although to the readers, it may seem as if the character has gone mad, when taking a closer look that may not be the case. Eventually the narrator’s guilt gets to him through the sound of the dead man’s beating heart under the floorboards. Digging deeper we can find the evidences that drove the man to such madness, showing that not all of what the main character did was mad but rather a brilliantly planned out murder as an act of sanity. In Poe’s Short story the man committed the murderous crime and with such an act of …show more content…

Poe’s creative writing techniques let the reader explore the many different opinions and conclusions that can be made about the characters in his stories. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the perfect example of a story that allows the reader to explore the sanity or rather insanity of the main character. The narrator in the story murders his housemate. The readers then have the choice to decide whether or not it was in cold blood or through a brilliantly planned out scheme. The narrator tries to assure the readers that he is not an insane man and that this old man was an insignificant problem that needed to go. When a closer look is taken, the reader is able to decide for him/herself if the narrator was a true

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