The Unreliable Narrator In Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allen Poe

In addition to the fact that the narrator understood that murdering someone is wrong, the narrator has a motive for killing the old man. Right off the bat, the narrator tells the reader why he wanted to kill the old man. He says, “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 for ever.” This indicates that he had a clear rationale for killing the old man and is guilty of first degree, or premeditated murder. Some may argue that the narrator is mentally insane and killed the man because over an irrational fear caused by his mental illness. However, an insane person would not wait to terminate a powerful feeling of paranoia and to assassinate the person causing such fear.

Every night he would watch the old man sleep. He found comfort in knowing that the eye was not watching him, that it could not see the true evil in him. While the eye was closed, so was the idea of killing the old man. It is not until the old man awakens each day that the struggle within him is apparent. This may be the reason why the narrator is so obsessed with watching the old man sleep. The actual act of murder, which the man believes was premeditated, was in fact a spur of the moment action. He toiled with the idea while the man was awake, that is, while he could see the "evil eye". However, while the eye was closed, the man was at peace. One night, during one of the man's "stalking" sessions, the old man awakens. The man goes into a paranoid frenzy, mistaking the beating of his heart for the beating of the old man's heart. During this frenzy, the man is afraid that neighbors will hear the beating of the old man's heart. This causes the man to take action. He quickly subdues the old man and kills him. He then takes extreme steps in disposing of the body, dismembering it and burying it under the planks in the floorboard. These extreme actions can be used as evidence to the paranoia that is taking over him. The fear of getting caught would be a normal reaction to someone who has committed a murder. However, the dismemberment of the body was not necessary since the man had ample resources to dispose of

Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly --very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep.” His madness is definitely on a different level than just a psycho. He is insane and loosing it every moment of the story, repeating words and using disturbing metaphors and similes. He compares many things such as referring to the eye of the old man as the “evil eye”, and “eye of a vulture”. Metaphors are used constantly to confuse the readers. “I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye.”

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a short story about internal conflict and obsession, showcases the tortured soul due to a guilty conscience. The story opens with an unnamed narrator describing a man deranged and plagued with a guilty conscience for a murderous act. This man, the narrator, suffers from paranoia, and the reason for his crime is solely in his disturbed mind. He becomes fixated on the victim’s (the old man’s) eye, and his conscience forces him to demonize the eye. Finally, the reader is taken on a journey through the planning and execution of a murder at the hands of the narrator. Ultimately, the narrator’s obsession causes an unjust death which culminates into internal conflict due to his guilty conscience. The

1. He is not a reliable narrator because he is insane. Though he repeatedly states that he is sane, the reader suspects otherwise from his bizarre reasoning, behavior, and speech. ‘‘True—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?'' The reader realizes through Poe’s description of the narrator’s extreme nervousness that the protagonist has in fact descended into madness, as anxiety is a common symptom of insanity. He apparently suffers from some form of paranoia. Besides, the narrator claims that he loves the old man and has no motive for the murder other than his growing dislike of a cloudy film over one of the old man’s eyes. His madness becomes

Edgar Allen Poe's narrators are unreliable such as in the stories, ¨A Tell-Tale Heart¨ and ¨The Black Cat¨ because the narrators are alcoholics and have mental disabilities. A unreliable narrator is someone who can not be trusted to tell a story in the correct way because there is something wrong with them that makes them incapable of telling a story. For example, in the stories listed above the narrators are either always intoxicated or they have mental disabilities which make them illegible to explain a story. They can alter or change the story to fit their perspective and they could forget a part or even be making it up. Since they are unreliable you can not trust what they say. In all of Poe's work the narrators are unreliable and there are many ways to prove it.

In the story “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, is about a narrator, that kill and old man because of an idea that came to his brain for the old man’s eye. Once he determines to kill the old man, the narrator formulates a plan that fully acknowledges the effects of his actions. As he begins the explanation of his plan, he assures the readers with a sense of pride “how wisely[he proceeds] with what caution with what foresight with what dissimulation [he goes] to work”(1). The day he had killed him, he felt different. The narrator was just thinking about the man that he had killed. The narrator had killed a man which was an action that could leave to be important. He notices something about the man that is haunting him day and night. Trying to see whatś wrong with, the old man, he notices that “every night just at midnight [he finds] the eye always closed, but the old man who [vexes him, but his eye”(1). Every day it was hunting him down. He was just thinking about, the old man’s evil eye. He thought the old man had an evil eye, so he had a thought to kill the man. The officers came to his house because they suspected from him. Suspecting the narrator's guilty the

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe depicts a gruesome tale. His use of dark imagery and harsh words make this story an unmistakable product of the Dark Romantic period. Poe’s use of the first person narrator adds an important dimension to the story. The narrator’s thoughts are eating him alive and Poe clearly portrays this to readers by repeating words and having the narrator constantly question himself:

It all began when the police had entered the house of the old man. The narrator however was feeling very confident about hiding the old man's corpse. He had offered the police to stay and chat after searching. The narrator claimed to hear the heartbeat of the old man’s eye from underneath the wood floor. He says at the beginning “The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them.

Once he commits the crime he feels gleeful and nonchalant. In a turn of events, it ends up not going in his favor. The author has built a chillingly suspenseful realm by the use of revealing the narrator’s fear of the eye, grimly written descriptions of gore and the repetition of a beating heart. One way that suspense is shown is through explaining the narrator’s fear of the old man’s eye. The narrator lives with an old man who seems a bit off.

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe entails many risks and consequences that are incurred by the narrator. Many questions begin to arise as to whether the narrator is a really a “madman” or if his actions were justified. It appears he very well may be a “madman.” The actions of the narrator are not that of a crime of passion but more so that of premeditated murder. The timeline of this story takes place in eight nights.

He is a young, strong, intelligent man who can be loving, kind and very polite. He seems completely normal to those around him, but at heart he is dark, selfish and maybe even crazy. Although others may perceive our narrator as any other normal man, he does not seem to fit the persona of a normal man, our narrator seems to have a gift of illusion. Our narrator never assumes that he is crazy, in fact, he protests to the very idea of himself being crazy. Yet his mind is conflicted about killing a man that he cares for, over his eye that distresses him so much that he decides he must be rid of it.

Edgar Allen Poe was known for his dark-romanticism writings which evoked horror in readers. Seen specifically in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, readers are able to get into the mind of the mentally ill narrator who murders an elderly man, one whom he claimed to love. Poe created conflict in this story by having the narrator admit to loving the man and having him be his caretaker. Conflict, and the story line, is created because it makes readers question why he would commit such a heinous crime as killing and dismembering the man. Readers eventually find out that it is the elderly man’s eye that pushes the narrator to do what he does. The narrator is trying to justify his actions and prove his sanity by explaining how he observes

The narrator of the story suffers from heightened senses which makes the narrator despise the clouded eye of his roommate. Due to his condition, he is driven to the point of plotting the murder of the cloudy eyed man. However, the narrator argues that since he planned the deed so meticulously, he could not be crazy and that “madmen know nothing” and he was no madman. There is reason to believe he is lying about the state of his sanity because the narrator does end up killing the man to rid himself of the evil eye. Affected by his anxieties, the narrator begins to hear what he believes to be the heartbeat of the man he has murdered. The heartbeat did not create a sense of regret in the narrator, rather “it increased [his] fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.” The unreliable source of narration is due to the mental illness which allows for the narrator’s judgment to be misconstrued. Guilt of conscience is the main theme and allows for the overall character arch of the narrator as his heightened senses, or more realistically, his anxieties, are the cause of his confession. Although the narrator had killed the man, he was not evil. The narrator was not in the right mind to take action and immediately had the guilt weigh heavy on his mind, causing it to slowly collapse. Nevertheless, the narrator, for these reasons, remains unreliable and mentally

Edgar Allan Poe is an American poet well-known for his eerie and gothic based themes. In fact, his tales of mystery and horror were the first to give rise to detective stories. In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), Poe invites us to experience a sinister and mystifying murder through the mind of the murderer, the narrator himself. This self-narrated tale takes place in a house that the narrator shares with an old man. The story’s focal characters are the narrator and the old man, both of whom are left nameless. It is probable that the narrator is telling the story from either prison or an insane asylum. He tries to justify his sanity; however, his actions prove otherwise. This tale revolves around the narrator 's passion to kill the old man because of his “evil eye” and the obsessed mind of the narrator who hears the beating of the dead man’s heart—solely within his own tortured imagination which causes the reader to question if the narrator is mentally sane or not. By analyzing how Poe’s early life influenced his work, I will demonstrate how Poe’s story engages readers with two widely occurring, but rarely explored elements of human experiences: a guilty conscience and the descent into madness. He takes his inner emotions to the extreme through his work and portrays the message that a guilty conscience will drive you insane. I will be analyzing how Poe’s early influences affect the