preview

The Tell Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Better Essays

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It is told by anonymous narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of his sanity, while describing a murder he committed. The victim was an old man with a filmy "vulture-eye" (cataract eye), as the narrator calls it. The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer dismembers the body and hides it under the floorboards. Ultimately the narrator 's guilt manifests itself in the form of the sound ( hallucinatory) of the old man 's heart still beating under the floorboards. Throughout this experience the narrator explains that the murderer is legally insane. There are various instances in the story that indirectly and directly tell you that he is insane. Such as he admits …show more content…

Another example explains that he has some sort of disease, “This disease has sharpened my senses -not destroyed them-not dulled them (Poe 294)”. He again is admitting he has a psychotic behavior. Throughout he is trying to convince us that he is not mad but this makes us doubt he is sane even more. Moreover, as the story unfolds, the narrator 's actions further suggest his insanity; his imagined hearing of the still beating heart. Explains that he is imagining things and he is getting paranoid. As the story states he continually heard the noises while talking to the polite policeman (who did not hear the noise at all) . The story illustrates his emotions are out of control. He feels a state of paranoia and agony, over an imaginary sound. This is only one of the many symptoms he implicates in the story that are common in psychotic people. Bipolar disorder causes a periodic cycling of emotional states between manic and depressive phases. Manic phases contain periods of extreme activity and heightened emotions, whereas depressive phases are characterized by guilt,sadness, and loneliness. These traits are common with the narrator. He had felt so

Get Access