The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis

📌Category: Literature
📌Words: 605
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 03 February 2022

We can perceive characters within a narrative to be ordinary or anomalous with characteristics and traits to support how they appear. Do you believe the unnamed narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe was sane or insane? In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” the anonymous narrator seeks to prove his innocence to his audience after the disclosure of murdering an elderly man in the midst of the night. The Narrator urges his audience that a male like him is not insane, but his evidence lacks to support his claim that he’s not mentally ill after killing an innocent man.

To firstly prove to his audience that he is not mentally ill, he expresses his emotions for the elderly man. In the narrative, he explains the love he had for the victim before murdering him. The narrator states, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult,” This quote shows the respect he had for the elderly man. When stating his love for the older man, he attempts to convince the readers that he still has warmth in his heart to be seen as an ordinary man. However, many ordinary men wouldn’t just kill an innocent human being that they loved.

To add on, the narrator, later on, defends his innocence by explaining the “wise precautions” he took in order to cover up the dead corpse. The narrator states, “If still, you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body,” in this quote the narrator is trying to reveal to his audience that covering up a dead corpse wasn’t “big deal”. When stating his reason to prove his claim of being sane, he exclaims how he went about covering up the body, so no one can find it to be seen as an ordinary person in others’ eyes.

Although the narrator was attempting to persuade his audience that he wasn’t insane, he was. For Instance, the storyteller announces his hatred for the victim’s eye causing him to develop a plan to end the victim’s life, the narrator states, “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever,” this quote shows the insanity trait the character poses in the story since many normal humans don’t develop hatred over another man’s eye. Not only did the narrator develop a plan to end the elder’s life he then smiled after executing him. In the story, he states, “I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done,” this quote reveals again the insane trait the narrator possesses. Many ordinary individuals wouldn’t normally kill someone because of their eyes and then smile after hearing their last breath. The narrator is sought out to be mentally ill because of his lack of reasoning to defend himself from being insane and the psychotic actions he took in the story.

As a result, the narrator’s argument falls short because of the lack of reasoning to prove his sanity to his audience. Throughout the narrative, it was shown to have more reasoning and evidence for him to be insane rather than sane. The narrator mainly relies on weak reasoning to support his claim that he is not mentally insane after the killing of an innocent elderly man. When reading the narrative I noticed many pieces of evidence to back my claim that he is mentally unstable such as his poor reasoning to kill the older man, watching the man sleep, and smiling after “the deed” was done.

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