Mental illnesses. There are many different ways to see if someone has one, especially when there is evidence at every corner and in between everything they say. But to ask someone who is more mentally unfit compared between two of Edgar Allen Poe’s characters from his two well known stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask Of Amontillado”, they would surely choose the narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart. This is said because the murder of the old man, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, was much more brutal than Fortunato’s death in, “The Cask Of Amontillado”, because of the way the murders were planned out, and by the way the narrator's killed each of the men. Each of their reasonings to kill these people where justified by their own personal choices and because they wanted to do so.
The narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” smothered the old man with the bedcovers to kill him. “Still his heart was beating; but I smiled as I felt that success was near. For many minutes that heart continued to beat; but at last the beating stopped. The old man was dead. I took away the bedcovers and held my ear over his heart. There was no sound. Yes. He was dead! Dead as a stone. His eye would trouble me no more!” (Poe 66). He was proud of “successfully” getting rid of the old man's vulture like eye. The
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The narrator had no harsh feelings for the old man though. He even said he was a nice person,“And every morning I went to his room, and with a warm, friendly voice I asked him how he had slept. He could not guess that every night, just at twelve, I looked in at him as he slept”(Poe 65), but the only concern the narrator had, was getting rid of the man's evil eye. The old man's eye is the stressor of the narrator's mental breakdown. If the old man's eye was not “vulture like” then the death if the old man would most likely have not occurred in the
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” murders an elderly man because he is fearful of the man’s “evil eye.” “He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever” (Poe 37). The narrator explains that he is haunted by the man’s eye and the only way to
In both stories, the chief characters plan in great detail the actions they will take to rid themselves of that which haunts them. The narrator of "The Telltale Heart" is the killer, and he explains in the telling of his story how he felt no ill will toward the old man, but how it was the old man's pale eye that caused his "blood (to) run cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - (he) made up (his) mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid (himself) of the eye forever."[382] Later, he reflects on how meticulously he goes about entering the old man's room, planning the murder. "For seven nights - every night at midnight" he enters the sleeping chamber.[383] Prince Prospero, in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," decides to take with him many friendly "knights and dames"[386] from his court and hide away in secl...
The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator realizes that he absences a reason for killing the old man he lives with. He even starts to admit having to love the man. He states, “There was no reason for what I did. I did not hate the old man; I even loved him. He had never hurt me. I did not want his money. I think it was his eye” (Poe 64). Psychosis is seen in the difficult rationality the narrator uses to defend his murder. The logic the narrator provides is that he thinks the desire to murder the old man results from the man’s eye, which bothers him. He says, “When the old man looked at me with his vulture eye a cold feeling went up and down my back; even my blood became cold. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!” (Poe 65). The fact that by this man’s eye is what makes him very angry is such a irrelevant reason for the narrator to kill him. This proves that he is not mentally stable, anyone in their right state of mind would not want to commit such a crime due to an irritation of someone’s eye. This represents the idea that this narrator expresses his complete lack of sanity through the premeditation and planning he put into committing the murder. In the beginning of the story, he says “vulture eye” giving the impression that he is uncertain that the eye is the reason for the murder, he also says how he thinks it’s the eye, he uses past tense as opposed to declaring with certainty that this is why the killing of the man. This shows the contrast to how as a sane person would be sure that this is their reason for killing another person before committing.
In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the reader can tell the narrator is unreliable. The narrator shows this through his lack of reason for killing Fortunato. Also, the narrator indicates that he is unreliable when he laughs as he kills Fortunato; only a madman would laugh while killing someone. The narration of the story makes it so the reader questions why the narrator killed Fortunato. Another question most readers have is, why is the narrator sharing this story? Also, readers commonly ask themselves, what has happened to make him share this story? The narrator says, “For half of a century no mortal has disturbed them” (Poe 113). This statement by the narrator may make a reader feel that Fortunato’s body has been moved or found. Likewise, it may make a reader feel that the narrator is bragging to someone about getting away with murder because he is possibly on his
In this particular story, Poe decided to write it in the first person narrative. This technique is used to get inside the main character's head and view his thoughts and are often exciting. The narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart is telling the story on how he killed the old man while pleading his sanity. To quote a phrase from the first paragraph, "The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story." This shows that we are in his thou...
Many people have attempted to rationalize the meaning of the single "evil eye." Some people have attempted to relate the old man to a Cyclops. However, I see this eye from a Christian point of view. The eye is not "evil" in the sense of the devil instead in my humble opinion it is the eye of God. I agreed with B. D. Tucker. The first thing I attempted to do, was relate the Cyclops theory however, this did not sit well with me. The reason the Cyclops theory does not fit the story is that in the second paragraph Poe writes, "One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture" (Kennedy 34). The mythical Greek creature had only o...
In the Edgar Allan Poe stories "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" the most prominent and important themes that are used are death, logic, and irony. The characters of the narrator and Montresor in these stories are both coldblooded murders who kill for selfish and inane reasons who firmly believe that their actions are justified even though their justifications only make sense in their own minds. They both try to convince their audience that they are sane by explaining to them their reasons for killing their victims and admitting how they did it, which only helps to prove their insanity. The narrator and Montresor are similar in that they both have impaired senses of judgment encouraged by perverse morals and believe that the horrible things that they do are justifiable.
In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, there are only five characters mentioned in the story: the narrator, the old man, and three police officers, none of whom is ever named. Throughout the story, the narrator tells the audience over and over that he is not mad. He becomes obsessed with trying to prove that he is not a madman and eventually goes crazy in the end. He tells the story of how he kills the old man after seven nights of watching him sleep. He has nothing against the old man and actually likes him, but it is the old man’s pale blue eye with a film over it that overwhelms the narrator with anger. This is when he decides to rid of this “vulture eye,” by murdering the old man. After finally finishing what he had set out to do, three policemen show up because of a complaint about a shriek. The narrator assures them that it was him that had shrieked because of a nightmare and asks the officers to sit with him. While talking with them, confident that they knew nothing, he starts to hear a noise increasingly get louder. He eventually cannot take it anymore and
The narrators of both stories are reliable. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is reliable because he is telling a story about an event in his life he experienced first-hand. On the other hand, I feel he holds no creditability because he can’t see and accept himself as being a mad man. The narrator is disturbed by an old man’s eyes. The narrator shows this saying "I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!" (Poe 1). The old man’s eyes are described as being pale blue that has a film over it. The narrator discloses how the old man’s eyes made him feel cold. As a matter fact, the old man’s eyes frighten the narrator instilling fear for his life when he looks at them. The man
First off, Poe did an excellent job of hiding the physical identity of the narrator by not including a gender, name, age or even features of what the narrator looks like. Not being able to understand what the character looks like is a bit aggravating because knowing the gender you could come up with other possible motives for killing him other than his eye. The narrators relationship is never explained but we have to assume that he has some type of relationship with the old man. I think that was Poe's intention so the reader could have a complete understanding that people can commit crimes without having a reason. The narrator is not secretive when expressing his thoughts towards the old man. For example the narrator says " Object there was none. Passion there was none. I love the old man. He had never wrong me. He had never given me insult." (42 Backpack Literature). This quote was important to emphasize the point that the narrator had no real motive to kill the old man and all of his reasoning was hidden inside his head. Being secretive helps explain other ch...
At the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe’s fascination with death is apparent when the narrator ruthlessly killed an old man with a disturbing eye, but felt so guilty that he confessed to the police. The narrator dismembered the old man’s body and hid them in the floor, confident that they were concealed. However, when the police came to investigate, the narrator heard a heart beating and began to crack under the pressure. Overcome with guilt, he confessed that he murdered him and pulled up the floorboards. The narrator exclaimed, “But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision!” (“Heart” 4). Although the narrator was calm and confident at first, the guilt he experienced drove him mad, causing...
Through the first person narrator, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how man's imagination is capable of being so vivid that it profoundly affects people's lives. The manifestation of the narrator's imagination unconsciously plants seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an unmanageable situation for which there is no room for reason and which culminates in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lends itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death would monetarily benefit the narrator. Moreover, the narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator's obsession with the old man's eye culminates in his own undoing as he is engulfed with internal conflict and his own transformation from confidence to guilt.
The story opens with the narrator explaining his sanity after murdering his companion. By immediately presenting the reader with the textbook definition of an unreliable narrator, Poe attempts to distort his audience’s perceptions from the beginning. This point is further emphasized by his focus on the perceived nexus of madness; the eye. Poe, through the narrator, compares the old man’s eye to the eye of a vulture. Because vultures are birds that prey on the weak and depend on their eyesight to hunt, it is easy to deduct that Poe’s intention is to connect the narrator’s guilt and his interpretation of events in his life. By equating the eye to the old man’s ability to see more than what others see, Poe allows the narrator to explore the idea that this eye can see his weakness; the evil that lies in the narrator’s heart and that which makes him unacceptable. Knowing that he is damaged makes the narrato...
On the surface, the physical setting of The Tell Tale Heart is typical of the period and exceedingly typical of Poe. The narrator and the old man live in an old, dark house: '(for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers)'; (Poe 778). Most of the story takes place at night: 'And this I did for seven long nights-every night just at midnight?'; (778). The physical aspect is not the most important component of setting for this analysis. More important are the mental and emotional settings. This clearly explains the personality of the narrator. One can assume the narrator is insane. He freely admits to his listener that he is '?-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous?'; (777). But he then asks, '?but why will you say that I am mad?'; (777). He also admits that, 'The disease had sharpened my senses?'; (777). If not insanity, what disease does he speak of? The reason for his actions was one of the old man's eyes: '?-a pale blue eye, with a film over it'; (777). This is easily recognizable to the reader as an eye with cataract on it. This is nothin...
“He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees --very gradually --I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” (Poe 1)