Tell Tale Heart
Within the human psyche there is a small and sometimes undefined line between what drives us to do good and that which pushes towards corruption. The battle to maintain balance between the two is the theme of Edgar Allan Poe's ''The Tell-Tale Heart.'' For sane individuals it requires a traumatic or life altering event to push them across the line, however for the insane it can be a very inconsequential event that drives them completely mad. From the onset of this story the narrator tries to convince us, as the reader, that he is not mad, but rather has acquired due to an illness ''sharpened the senses.''(par. 1). The first instance in which we are let in on how acute his senses are is the case of the old man's ''vulture eye.''(par. 3). The old man's eye evokes an irrational fear out of the narrator from the onset. ''When it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees-I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.'' (par. 2). It was only this brief encoun
The irony exists in that the whole time he has been stalking the old man he has used great care in order not to disturb him from his bed. A rather ironic requirement for him to murder the old man is that he has to see the ''blue-glazed'' eye gazing upon him. If the eye is what pushed over the line of sanity it would be the old man's constantly beating heart that would lead to his demise. He then uses detail of how he disposes of the body in which he describes how cunning he is to try and make us believe that he is not in fact mad. The heart is first heard as only a faint noise in the narrator's head but it later beings to increase in intensity and begins to envelope his mind. The narrator's murderous act takes place on the eighth night of his stalking. ''I could see nothing of the old man's face: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot. The narrator's irrational actions towards the old man exemplify the line that is drawn between what is good and what is corrupt. Edgar Allan Poe's use of the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart,'' serves to make us aware that although this story is told from the first person point-of-view, we can't always trust what he tells us. His attempts at letting us into his personality only further our beliefs of his madness. He feels by describing in great depth the method in which he went about stalking and eventually killing the old man, that we will accept his acute senses rather than his madness. It serves to increase his fury ''as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage,''(par. But by this point it is obvious to us that he is indeed mad.
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