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The Tell Tale Heart Deception Analysis

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The short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by Edgar Allan Poe, is about an unnamed man who uses self-deception as a way to justify his harrowing act of murdering his elderly roommate. The first deception that he tries to convince the reader of is the fact that he is not a madman. He has a completely the unreasonable idea that he can prove his sanity “by ‘healthily’ and ‘calmly’ retelling the story of how he murdered his roommate” (Desmondleica np). He points out that mad men know nothing and don’t plan, but he is very intelligent and his plan to murder and hide his the old man body is pure genies. In fact, he is extremely proud of his murderous plan and continues to brag about how intelligent he is. He also tries to use the fact that his …show more content…

He first hears the sound when he is about to murder the old man, so he believes his enhanced senses are hearing the old man’s heartbeat and as it gets louder he believes the neighbors will hear so he is lead to commit the deed. Any sane person knows that their heart beats harder and faster in times of stress, so fast that it feels like it is beating out of their chest (). Because the narrator does not not want to believe he is that stressed out, he convinces himself that the heartbeat is coming from the old man. Later when the police come to investigate a noise reported by the neighbors, the narrator starts out very calm and proud. Overtime the guilt of what he has done and the stress of the situation causes his heart to begin to race, but of course he does not want to admit these feeling so he again convinces himself that the heartbeat is the old mans. The noise becomes so loud that he is convinced the police can hear it and are now mocking him by sitting there and talking like nothing is happening. This delusion leads straight back to his obvious madness and ultimately forces him to confess his crime because he could no longer take the stress of the situation. The narrator does not want to admit he is mad or that he is stressed out and guilty because of what he has done so he uses self-deception to put his mind at

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