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

The narrator states that, “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever”(Poe 2). In this sentence the reader begins to understand that the narrator wants to kill the old man over the small feature of his eye. The old man 's vulture eye is the only thing bothering him, and is the only reason he decided to kill him. If the narrator had been insane he would not have taken careful thought to kill the old man. If a person is insane it is a flash decision where they do not have control over their actions and are unaware of what they are doing.

He expresses an uncertainty on the person he was and wanted to know if he was truly deserving of taking the life of someone else. He wanted to know if he was “...a louse like all the rest…” and thus the true reasoning behind his crimes is revealed (Dostoevsky 419). Raskolnikov did not murder the pawnbroker for money or to be just. He simply wanted to kill for himself. His unstable understanding

Firstly, he killed the old man because of his eye. Additionally , he claimed that he kept hearing the heartbeat when the old man was dead. In closing, he had no control over himself. The difference between a sane person and an insane person is how they think and act. The narrator is obviously insane since he acted easy and normal in situations that are expected to be handled differently, like the time the policemen came to question him about the noises coming out of the house.

Victor also allows Justine to die for the murder of his younger brother because he’s afraid of what people will think. “My tale was not one to announce publicly; it’s astounding horror would be looked upon as madness by the vulgar”(83). He’s more concerned with what will happen to him, someone who actually had something to do with William’s death, than to Justine, who is completely innocent. Lastly, the monster says he will leave Victor and his family alone if Victor makes him a female companion, but he can’t even do that. “I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged”(180).

Hamlet was plotting his uncle’s murder, something the majority of people would view as completely insane, but it is how he plotted this murder that makes it clear that he is not mad. He deceives his friends and family into thinking he has gone completely mad, but it is his actions that prove to the reader that he may not be as mad as the king and queen believe. His unwillingness to kill Claudius because “he is a-praying.. And so he goes to heaven; And so I am revenged: And so he is scanned:” (III/iii/76-79) proves that he still has some reason and has put some thought into this murder. Also, it is how Hamlet acts towards his love, Ophelia, that proves that he may not truly be mad, especially in Act 5 during her funeral when he returns and states “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers could not with all their love make up my sum.”(V/i/262-264) Hamlet attempts to deceive the entire kingdom into labelling him as mad so that they would think nothing of him.

I believe that hamlets actions were not justified but one is, because revenge isn’t a good thing, but Claudius is not just a murderer he is a stealer too. Claudius killed Hamlets father with the easiest but the cleverest way. He poisoned Hamlets father himself, while Hamlets father was sleeping. Then Claudius told everyone that he died of a sudden heart attack or some disease nobody knew

The conflict’s the narrator had to deal with were both between himself and with society. The narrator’s internal conflict consisted of him trying to convince himself that he was sane and had every reason to commit the immoral sins of murdering the old man. He murdered this man solely because of his eye, or at least that’s what he kept saying in the short passage. He was having intense thoughts about committing this crime and trying to convince himself and society that he did this for multiple reasons and that his reasons were 100% justifiable. He constantly had a battle with himself to solely make himself feel like that actions he took upon were okay.

Paradoxically, his overemphasis of his sanity causes the reader to assume he is essentially mad. He merely lacks motive for killing the old man. He proves to be insane and mentally unstable by his actions previous and after committing the deed. An example of his insanity is portrayed through the narrator’s action of welcoming the police to converse in the room where the narrator has concealed the old man’s body, and placing his chair directly atop of where the corpse has been disposed of. He premeditated the murder, and then felt confident enough to boast by doing this.

In The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator is guilty of murder because he was quiet and cautious to watch the old man by taking an hour to put his head through the door and when the narrator dismantles the old man’s body after the narrator suffocated him, he decided to kill the old man over time, and he let the officers into the home and lied to cover up the murder but at the end, he gave in to his guilt and chose to admit the deed to the

Based on the evidence presented in the 8th amendment of the Death Penalty the main character should be condemned to a psychiatric institute because, the narrator killed the old man for a foolish reason and the time it took to execute with his plan is unhinged. Initially, the narrator had a very unreasonable motive for killing the old man, which in this way he can perceive as a madman. He had said, ‘I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.