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
In the short story, the “Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the unnamed narrator reveals his motivation through monologue while retelling the events of a murder to his audience. The tale is told in chronological order beginning with his reason for killing “the old man.” He proceeds to explain how rationally he planned and committed the murder. Finally, the narrator discloses why he confesses the successful murder to the police officers. As the story progresses, it is clear through the tone and voice that he is mentally collapsing under the burden of his guilt and psychosis. The story begins with a confession.
The motive for killing the old man may be questionable, but the fact that the narrator refrained from killing the old man in his sleep during those seven nights shows how capable he was at controlling his behavior. The narrator could have easily killed the old man during those seven nights because he was sleeping. However, he didn’t do this. Instead, the narrator didn’t try to kill the old man because one of the old man’s eye, which was the narrator’s motive for killing the old man, wasn’t open. The narrator knew his motive for killing the old man, so he didn’t try to prematurely kill the old man.
The narrator is a caregiver of an old man and one day develops the desire to kill the old man. The narrator initially explains that he had no true reason to murder the old man, however, once the idea entered his head, he could not think otherwise. His desire to kill the old man strengthened when he explained his hatred for the old man’s cloudy eye. The narrator despised the eye and decided to carry on with his deed. The story continues as the narrator describes the development of his murder until the night he commited the crime.
As the story progresses, the narrator leads the reader throughout his journey, which ends with him finally killing the man. For this reason, the murderer should be sentenced to psychiatric treatment and twenty years of prison, since he acted exactly like a madman (hearing noises and sounds that didn’t exist), and he actually made a plan to go through with the murder. One of the themes that is consistent throughout this story is the idea of mental illness. The main character shows signs of being mentally ill as he constantly makes it clear that his sole reason for wanting to kill the old man is his eye (as he mentions in the text, he “grew furious as he gazed upon it” (Poe, 1843)). Sometimes paranoia causes you to act in certain ways, making you take rash decisions.
The man justifies his perturbing actions to prove himself sane which leads to the self-destruction of the narrator. The narrator experiences "three states of being are present concurrently: emotional tension, loss of mental grasp upon the actualities of the situation, and inability to act or act deliberately" (Robinson
The narrator reveals, “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe 37). No sane person would think of doing such a thing, they would just avoid seeing the old man. Instead, the narrator chooses to kill the old man which does not make sense to the average, but to him, this is the only way to relieve himself of the eye. As the narrator craziness increases throughout the story, one can see how the eye of the old
Edgar Allan Poe made sure the reader knew more than the secondary character in his short story to build suspense. For the entire week before he murdered the old man, the main character crept into his bedroom every night, and observed the man while he slept. “I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed… He was still sitting up in the bed, listening;--just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.” From the beginning, the audience knew the man would be murdered, and the suspense built from this knowledge. Since the old man was not aware of the devious plan of his housemate, the readers felt inclined to warn
“ The Tell-Tale Heart” Interpretive Essay “He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.”(Poe, 1843) In the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan, a delusional madman plans the death of and innocent old man with an “eye of a vulture” over the course of eight nights. The narrator wanted to kill the old man for only one reason, to get rid of his hideous eye. The killer is burdened with a disease in which he hears voices from heaven and hell, which is why he has a strange obsession with the victim’s eye. On the eight night, the perpetrator murdered the old man by smothering him with a heavy mattress.
The narrator tells a vividly descriptive report of his own actions, insisting he is of right mind, but his story quickly turns into the ramblings of a true madman. This narrator is in no way reliable. It is even possible this murder never even occurred. Although the narrator starts his account by attempting