Insanity Of The Narrator In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

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From the beginning of the short story the narrator seems to ramble and his thoughts are displayed in a chaotic manner. We get the feeling immediately from reading the introduction that whoever is speaking is unnatural. It is ironic how the narrator repeatedly tries to reassure himself that he is a man with a clear mental state, however, after murdering the old man for no apparent reason other than his “evil eye” this proves just how insane the narrator actually is; because of this our final opinion is that the narrator is clearly insane. The dark theme grasps the reader’s attention and one cannot help but continue reading on. Edgar Allan Poe does a great job taking the reader on a journey questioning what it means to be sane and insane in this…show more content…
To consider the narrators sanity the reader wonders just who the narrator is addressing. Could it be that he is trying to make himself seem insane as a means to get a lighter sentence, after all he did confess to murder in front of policemen in the last paragraph of the story. This is what is so cunning about this story, the reader isn’t really sure if the narrator is an insane or sane murderer. For example, murderers kill people all of the time for ludicrous reasons, but what separates the murderers from those who kill because of their insanity, is the premeditated planning of a murder, which in this case the narrator had done. The narrator claims in just the third paragraph, that the plan to kill the old man was very well thought out stating “you should have seen me, you should have seen how wisely I proceeded with what caution…would a madman have been so wise as this?” In the third paragraph the reader reverses the notion of an insane narrator, and now perceives him as a sane murderer we go along with what the narrator claims, however, that all changes towards the end of the short
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