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Schizophrenia In Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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What’s real? What isn’t? When you’re reading this do you hear the little voice in your head helping you comprehend what is written on this page? Will that voice ever turn on you and harm you? Being watched? Tell me, feeling schizophrenic yet? In the story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator kills an old man with a strange eye, because the eye seems to be following and judging the narrator, plotting to harm him.The murder was planned efficiently, even if the narrator seemed like a madman. Even though some might believe that the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” suffers from tinnitus, evidence suggests that he has schizophrenia. Sometimes, people think the narrator has tinnitus. Tinnitus is a ringing in the ears that only the person hearing the ringing can hear. People who believe the narrator has …show more content…

Schizophrenia is a condition where people see normal things and their mind twists the image into something terrifying, sad, abnormal, etc. A number of signs show that the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” clearly has schizophrenia. One important and alarming symptom of this condition is the belief that people are reading your mind or plotting to harm you. The narrator most likely thinks that the cops were mocking him when he was hearing the heartbeat because he thought they could hear the heartbeat too: “Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!-no, no! They heard!-they suspected!-they knew!-they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think ”(Poe 94). This shows that the narrator only believed for a second that the police couldn’t hear the beating. The thought of the narrator believing that the police can hear the heart, even though the context of the story proves otherwise, signals that he can hear thing that others can’t and also believes that people are trying to harm him. These are both major symptoms of

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