William Wordsworth also exclaimed “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interest me more than sanity”. Was he really insane? Or pious loving soul neglected by the world but appreciated by an elect few. The test of time is over and now he’s one of the greatest poets and artist and a visionary to mass. William Blake
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Edgar Allan Poe’s writing is still famous to this day. Not only his writing, but his life. He is known for having a difficult life and writing about it. Through all his poems and short stories there are little hints everywhere that relate to his life. Depression, insanity and tuberculosis were all common topics of Poe’s writing that related to his life.
Heart beating rapidly, trying to scream but can’t! Once reality kicks in, one can only realize that it was just a bad dream. The average person would want to get it out of the mind. This is not true for Edgar Allan Poe. He relived each moment of horror by writing it into a poem or short story.
In his short life, he often wrote detective and horror stories in an abstractive and contradictive way, such as The Tell Tale Heart and The Raven. In this story, the main character felt guilty because he got mad and killed the old man. Moreover, the author emphasizes the theme, which is that the human heart cannot tolerant the duty of guilt, through out the use of characterization, mood and symbolism. The narrator emphasized the theme of guilt by adding up an interesting characteristic to the main character as an insane “madman”, “ I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!
The most unreliable narrator is from “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe because he is extremely paranoid and tries to justify murdering someone. The narrator from the “The Tell-Tale Heart”’s extreme paranoia and auditory hallucinations cause him to be the most unreliable narrator out of all the three stories. While some may argue that the narrator from the “The Yellow Wallpaper” could be the most unreliable because she hallucinates that there is a figure hidden behind the wallpaper, for example when she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” The narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart is more unreliable because he often thinks others are out to get him. For example, when he is sitting in his home with the police and hears the old man’s heartbeat from under the floorboards he says, “They heard!- they suspected!- they knew!- they were making a mockery of my horror!- this I thought, and this I think.” This illustrates that the narrator is paranoid and believes the police are mocking him by not reacting to the heartbeat. He struggles to separate what he perceives in his mind from reality.
Some people say Edgar Allan Poe was crazy and that he had a really messed up mind, but, under all that, he wrote some good interesting horror fiction stories, and he became known as the best. In “Tell-Tale Heart” a man lives with an old man's that had a defective eye. The man somehow it’s scared of the old man’s eye and wants to kill the old man eyes. Edgar Allan Poe used the literary device of setting to create a dark, deep tone in his short story by using two important elements of setting, time of day and the mood and atmosphere. Edgar Allan Poe is using the primitive scary scenes that we are fearful to.
Poe creates a sense of madness in the poem “The Raven” by depression, insanity, and the Raven itself. Madness is not a way to treat yourself. Somehow it is a way to seek depression. Knowing how Poe creates the depression among the character in the poem, surely hints that he uses madness. “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” this specific line from the poem shows us how the man in the poem have been through different problems, that keep him down, and unable to stand.
However, not everyone believed or felt that he was as uncorrupted. Critics and poets alike found ways to voice their concerns, especially around the time of his death. Samuel Coleridge, famous poet, contributed to the work of “The Fall of Robespierre” that was published just after his death. During the first act, characters, Couthon and St. Just, speak of the fear they possess in regard to Robespierre. St. Just states fearfully, “I cannot fear him — yet we must not scorn him” to describe the contempt that even those close to Robespierre felt for his actions.
One can also imagine, the horrors that the piercing gaze of the old man, reminded Poe of. This gaze may have led Poe, to look at the depths of who he is. What Poe must have experienced, in the hands of his foster father was intensely painful, and this may have led him to bury these emotions very deeply into the subconscious. The narrator reveals in the Short Story, the deep truth of how a man’s heart can manipulate the truth, and how it can try to justify his actions. It also shows that if pains, run very deep, and have not been allowed to heal, they can destroy the fabric of one’s sanity.
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.