The truth about the tell-tale heart
Edgar Allen Poe was born in 1809 and died in 1849. He was an author of many great short stories. For the most part his pieces were considered to be horror stories such as; The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, and many other literary pieces. Poe was known for writing under the influence of alcohol: perhaps that's one of the main reasons Poe wrote about very dark subjects along with people who had sanity problems. In The Tell-Tale Heart Poe uses a narrator who tries to hide his insanity but fails to see that his story undermines his assertions of innocence and sanity. Poe was always very good at drawing the reader into his stories. In the beginning Poe introduces the reader to the main character, which is believed to be a mad man. As the reader is introduced to the main character in The Tell-Tale Heart, he try's to convince the reader that he's calm and completely sane. Throughout the story the reader catches the main character contradicting himself by saying, "Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded," (The Tell-Tale Heart). This guy is trying to make the reade
"It is telling that Usher refers to his disease-a neurasthenia widely construed in the Victorian era as the sign of an advanced biological and intellectual development- as the family evil," (Foucault in The House of Usher pg 10). IF the old man had never wronged him or insulted him, what would motivate the killer to kill the old man? His motivation had to come from another source like the old mans money. "Here we find a writer whose entire oeuvre is marked by a compulsive interest in the dimensionality of death: its physical signs, the phenomenology of dying, the deathbed scene, the appearance of the corpse, the effects of decomposition, the details of burial. The point of view is the criminal's but the tone is ironic in that his protestation of sanity produces an opposite effect upon the reader," (Robinson). The reader never would have known that the old man had money if he hadn't even brought up the fact that he didn't kill the old man for the money. The killer in The Tell-Tale Heart felt guilty about killing the old man and later the guilt got to him and forced him to confess to the murders. But the excessiveness of the precision and care mark the man as mentally instable, not mentally stable. Anyone who reads this story will see that the man is insane. The only reason he would look in just to see if the old mans eye was still fixed on him. As the narrator progresses the reader becomes more and more doubtful of the killers sanity as he describes his obsession with the eye. Any normal person would be able to get over the creepiness of the old mans eye and not stalk him in the middle of the night. Why would anyone who is sane have to keep implying that he is sane? They would just simply say they are sane once or twice but not keep implying it. He repeatedly asks the reader if he thinks me mad. "If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer.
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Acceptance Essays
