The Tell Tale Heart Persuasive Essay

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“Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them,” Alice Sebold once wrote. Murder is planned with the intelligence only man has, as Edgar Allen Poe demonstrates in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”. This story is about a cold-blooded murderer who cleverly planned the death of an old man. The butler of the old man first viciously murdered his master in the middle of the night, in an estate in the 1800s. Then, he fooled three deputy officers with ease, tricking them into believing he was insane. The old man’s butler is guilty of murder, because he was fully aware of his actions, had a false motive, and took a lot of time and energy into this plan. In the first place, the butler clearly knew what was going on. Specifically, he was aware that he was about to murder the old man. He understood, in his mind, that his master wouldn’t live much longer. According to the butler, as he confessed his crime, “all in vain; because Death, in approaching him, had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim” (Poe,81). Here, the butler openly claims the old man will die. He acknowledges the fact that death, in the form of murder, is coming. This shows that the butler has a murder plan in mind. He knows…show more content…
While in custody, he began to talk about his reasons. He wasn’t exactly confident on that matter. During the exchange, he exclaimed, “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this!”(Poe, 78). The butler had just started confessing, and was claiming that the old man’s eye was the cause of the murder. This was what he came up with after some serious thinking. Here, it proves that the murderer had to think of an excuse for killing the old man that would prove him insane. If he had really taken the life of his master for the eye, the the butler should have known all along what his motive was. Thus, it is obvious that the “evil eye” wasn’t his real
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