Tell Tale Heart analysis
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe deals with a man's mental deterioration and his descent into madness. The story focuses on the narrator and his obsessions. It is told from a first person point of view by the protagonist himself. The point of view of the story is important because the reader only has one side of the story to work with. Therefore, the reader only knows what the narrator thinks and sees. This complicates things in deciding why the narrator goes insane. However, the narrator does reveal his insanity, and he reveals it through his obsessions. The narrator's obsessions include; his obsessions with his own sanity, the old man's evil eye, and the old man's beating heart. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a story about a man, in this case the narrator, who for eight consecutive nights goes to the bedroom of another man. He stands at the door watching the man sleep with a single ray of light pointing directly at the sleeping man's eye, an evil eye according to the narrator. On the eighth night, the man is sitting up in bed with his eye open, and the narrator, consumed by the "evil eye" and the sound of the man's beating heart races into the room and kills the man in his bed. After the murder, the narrator disme
Either way, an obsession isn't something that merely goes in and out of a person's mind. The above line affirms the idea that the narrator can't really hear the beating of the old man's heart, and that it's not simply an "over-acuteness of the senses. As the narrator "hears" the beating of the heart grow quicker and louder, he reaches the point where he can't take it any longer, and lunges into the bedroom and kills the man. Aside from that, he is actually proud of his method for disposal of the "corpse" as he puts it. With this in mind, it seems difficult for one to think of the narrator as normal by any definition. On the one hand, if the evil eye wasn't his motive, then he could be considered insane for committing an act such as murder for no absolute reason. For example, the narrator goes to such extreme measures to conceal the eye after he kills the old man. More importantly, at the end of the story when the police come to investigate, the narrator has trouble with the sounds of the beating heart again. He even says at one point, "It grew louder, louder, louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. The way he expresses it however makes it sound as if the eye really wasn't his motive, and the only thing the narrator could remember about the old man was that the old man had "a pale blue eye, with a film over it. The idea of the "evil eye" carries on throughout the story, until finally the narrator snaps, and does something about it. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!" It's almost as if the narrator, as he is retelling the story, attempts to make up a motive for the murder. The narrator also has an unusual obsession with the old man's eye.
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