The Tell-Tale Heart Insanity

As the noise grew louder the narrator decided to make the final approach towards the old man by running out yelling “Die, Die!” As the old man dies, the narrator said “Still his heart was beating; but I smiled as I felt that success was near. For many minutes that heart continued to beat; but at last the beating stopped.” As the situation stopped the narrator soon calmed down which slowed down his heart rate, the narrator soon grabbed the bed sheets, to closely listen to the old man’s heart. Once he was pleased of not hearing the heart, he quickly dismembered the body and hid the old man in his bedroom under the floor planks.

The Tell Tale Heart talks about a neurotic nameless narrator claiming to be sane by how cunningly he sneaks into the old man’s room, but one night he was caught by the old man and his “vulture eyes”, so the narrator killed him . Therefore night time has a direct connection with the plot of the story, our unreliable narrator would sneak into the chamber of the old man every night to shine a lantern onto his eye. Another element could be to instill fear into readers’ minds, night time is symbolized by darkness and sins, a perfect time for a vicious murder to be committed.

ImageHave you read the story ‘’The Tell-Tale Heart’’? The story is basically about an old man with an eye, which is disturbing the narrator. So the narrator goes insane. The narrator of the story has an impulsive nature which makes him appear insane. He is absolutely not guilty by reason of insanity and should be sent to a mental hospital for special needs.

The narrator spends a great amount time carefully planning out the murder of the innocent old man, but demonstrates no logical reason for killing the old man, which makes the narrator appear mad. The narrator

Edgar Allen Poe’s 1843 short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” dwells on themes of true insanity and what it does to its victims. The unnamed narrator begins a fixation of an old man’s eye and decides the old man meet his demise for him to truly receive peace. There is tension between readers of “The Tell-Tale Heart” over if the illness within the narrator is mentally ill or not. Throughout the story his mental illnesses are showcased first-person, including a continuous plot of him trying to prove to himself that he is not mad, and a subconscious guilt for murdering the old man. Denial is a side effect of insanity.

Above all was the sense of hearing acute.’’. This lead to him believing he was hearing the heartbeat but it was actually all in his head. He began to hallucinate at the fact that the officers knew and heard the heartbeat too, ‘’Almighty God! --no, no! They heard!

“I smiled, for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream.” The Tell Tale Heart is one of Edger Allan Poe’s most famous and creepiest stories. The premise of this gothic short story is that a man’s own insanity gives him away as a murderer. By using the narrators own thoughts as the story Poe displays the mental instability and the unique way of creating a gothic fiction. While other stories written by Poe reflect this same gothic structure and questionable sanity, this story has a unique way of making the reader walk away from the story with an uncomfortable feeling. The mental struggles the narrator faces might as well reflect the depression and other psychological issues Edgar Allan Poe was confronted with in his own life.

Furthermore, he realized that his neighbors heard a scream and that they would call the police. The narrator even went as far as to cover up the body and hide it under the tiles of his own home. In addition, since he knew that the police would come to his house because of the shriek, he took precautions beforehand to cover up the body. Not to mention that he even told the police that the scream that the neighbors heard the night before was his from “A bad dream”. This further proves my theory that the narrator was mentally stable at the time of the murder

The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

own chamber. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell Tale Heart, the story of this murder is told from the point of view of the killer. The narrator tells of the man’s vulture-like eye, which causes him to murder the man to rid himself forever of the villainy the eye possessed. After the murder, the narrator is haunted by the sound of the man’s beating heart to the point that he has to admit to his felony. In this ghastly tale, the narrator is guilty of premeditated murder because he had a reason to kill the man, knew right from wrong throughout the story, and had a plan to kill the old man in advance.

Moreover, he tries to defend his sanity by explaining how wise and cautious he was as he was preparing for the murder. Every night he checked on the old man to make sure he got everything right and get ready to execute his plan. The narration lacks of a concrete explanation of the person or place to which it is addressed, which leaves much room for interpretation for the readers. What we can infer from the story is it is not addressed to the police officers since the narrator says he was successful in making them satisfied. Finally, the climax of the story comes as the revelation of the dead body hidden under the planks. Because the story is told as a memento, our estimation might be that the narrator is addressing a court official or personage who may influence over the judgment of the narrator. Therefore, the story that the narrator is telling is most accurately realized as an appeal for mercy rather than just being an appeal to be thought sane.

The next trick used in this story to make it scary was the beating of the mans heart once he woke up and came to be suspicious that someone was in the room with him. The speaker describes the beating of the heart as "so strange a noise as [it] excited me to uncontrollable terror" (Poe, 3). At this point the reader may think that it is the conscious of the speaker that is really bothering him rather than the mans heartbeat. Every time the speaker refers to the heartbeat he says that it keeps getting louder and louder. One can come to the assumption that at this point the speaker is only looking for reasons to support his killing a man. And in fact it is the beating of the mans heart that drove the speaker/killer to confessing about what he has done and showing the police where the body was.

“The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe is a fantastic short story, but how does it fit into literature? The story uses elements and techniques that delve into the gothic genre and allows the reader to be introduced to a darker reality. In “The Tell Tale Heart”, gothic elements reveal themselves in the short story through the use of setting and also through the use of characterization. These two elements are key components which demonstrate gothic features and help to classify this story as gothic literature. Murder and the supernatural elements also show that this text can be considered within the gothic genre of literature.

Gothic literature is a blend of horror and romance. The genre of gothic novels has been around for centuries, and therefore can be seen as indispensable in the literature world. Due to the dark sides and supernatural occurrences in these kind of books, reading these story can be quiet thrilling. The question that easily can cross our mind is what are the significant elements, so obligatory elements in order to create a gothic atmosphere? For this purpose, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” will be analyzed, as well as the use of Gothic motives.

Like many of Edgar Allen Poe's works, The Tell-Tale Heart is a dark story. This story focuses on the events leading to the death of an old man, as the sanity of his killer crumbles. Poe uses irony and first-person perspective to show a sense of paranoia within the story.