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

Insanity is a disease capable of making a person lose control of themselves. On the other hand, sanity is when a person is what others call “normal”. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe the narrator kills a man and he is confessing to the cops about it. He confesses how long the murder took and what he did each night and how he executed the murder. However, the narrator is not guilty because of the reason of insanity. One sign of the narrator being insane is that he has impulsive behavior. For example, the narrator says, “First of all, I dismembered the corpse, I cut off the head, and the arms, and the legs, or … works as well” (12). This means that he cut off the body without thinking about it beforehand. Furthermore, the narrator also says that he did not just leave the body there, but hid it too. All of this matters because it was a very sudden action he
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While this may be the case, many people may think he was fully aware of what he was doing. This can be proven wrong because the narrator states, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me... I think it was his eye yes, it was this!”(2).This quote reveals that it was not the old man at all that had made him want to murder him, it was his eye that was his motivation. This shows that he is not in control of his own morals because a trivial reason made him want to kill someone he loved. So, how could you say that he is fully in control of what he is doing if he were to kill someone he loved for a trivial reason? Overall, the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” kills a man, but he is not guilty due to the reason of insanity. The narrator is not guilty because he has impulsive behavior when he cuts up the old man. He also is not guilty because he cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and he cannot control his own morals. So, why not give this man a second chance? Everyone deserves