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The Tell Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Decent Essays

“The Tell-Tale Heart” A short story called the “The Tell-Tale Heart” was written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843. In the story, the narrator kills an old man that can’t see. People debate on whether Poe’s narrators are mentally insane, or just really smart in most of his poems and short stories. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” can be classified as mentally insane or a calculated killer. As the story begins there's a nameless person who is friends with an old man, but wants to kill him. In paragraph one the narrator says, “The disease had sharpened my senses of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” In the quote, it states, “The disease had sharpened my senses…” When the narrator says “disease...my” they are referring to themselves having some kind of disease. When the narrator also says, “I heard many things in hell.” Hell represents a place that’s bad and people who say they can hear things in hell is very uncommon. Although some people think the narrator is a calculated killer due to his senses improving, he is mentally insane because he thinks he can hear things that are beyond this world. In paragraph 5 the narrator is sneaking into the old man's room and watching him as he sleeps. The narrator then says, “Never, before that night, had I felt, the extent of my own powers -- of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph.” When the narrator is talking about their powers it’s not something a

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