The Theme Of Insanity In Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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Insanity is the state of being seriously mentally ill. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe, was convicted of a murder. He showed various characteristics in which many people would describe a insane, such as hearing and seeing things that really are not there. Many who struggle with mental illness share these same characteristics, and are unable to live a life in which they can think clearly, logically and thoroughly. It is something that those with mental illness struggle with on a day to day basis. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart was insane, because those who are mentally unstable cannot differentiate reality from fantasy, hear and see things that are not there, and they do not have a clear …show more content…

The narrator from The Tell-Tale Heart believed that the old man’s eye was haunting him. Anyone who is sane, would not find a eye to be vexed. It terrified him, which is the reason why the narrator murdered the old man. In the text, it states “ His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of on of those terrible birds that watched and wait while the animal dies…. And so, I finally decided I had to kill the old man and close that eye forever!” ( paragraph 3). This piece of evidence demonstrates the fact that the narrator is fantasizing what he thinks is real. No human’s eye actually resembles the eye of a vulture, so this is clearly in the narrator's imagination. Also, another man who pleaded innocent for reason of insanity- Bruco Eastwood shared similar characteristics as the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart did by not recognizing what is real and what is not. According to the article Insanity defense: Six notorious cases when it worked, written by Michael Roberts, it states that “ While is custody, Eastwood exhibited plenty of bizarre behavior- like picking at his skin in an attempt to remove the “ transforming forces” from his body” ( Roberts, paragraph 11). This piece of evidence represents the idea that this man was not living in reality, because he had to “ remove forces” from him body. Obviously there are no “ transforming forces” in the human body, and so he must be imagining

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