Madness is relative. The sanity of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart is best approached from two sides. One of which are from the narrator’s point of view, and the other is a neutral perspective. This is a man who stalked another, murdered him, and covered his traces only to be harassed by his victim’s heartbeat. With the narrator’s consistent denial of his madness, his homicide and overwhelming guilt is what induced his severe paranoia and apparent insanity. However, his actions were committed through fear, while his story affected by false memory and trauma. The narrator’s experience shows how a truly traumatic event can prove to completely destroy and alter any man’s sanity.
A traumatic event is an experience that completely overwhelms the person’s ability to cope with the emotions involved with that experience. In many cases, it may take weeks or years for someone to cope with their immediate circumstances. The narrator’s severe denial of his actions displays his inability to cope with what he did, which shows the psychological trauma that he went through. Trauma can lead to retrograde amnesia, the inability to recall events prior to the traumatic event. Coupled with false memories, much of the narrator’s story is misperceived and induced by madness.
In the opening paragraph of The Tell Tale Heart, the narrator exclaims, “True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? [. . .] Hearken! And observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe 43). It is clear that the narrator is explaining his story to someone. The fact that the entire story is being told in the past immediately indicates that he was in a different state...
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...e may very well be trying to convince the mysterious ‘eye’ that he’s not mad and what he did was indeed the right thing to do.
Trauma can change a man. In fact, posttraumatic stress disorder can develop as a result. However, in the narrator’s case, the situation is way more severe. He became delusional and used logical fallacies to prove a case he could never win. Although the narrator may have been insane as the story was told, he was mentally stable up until he committed the murder.
Works Cited
Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. London: Victor Gollancz, 1967. This text is a gaslight etext taken from http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/superhor.htm.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” rpt. in Fiction: A Pocket Anthology, 5th Edition. Ed. R.S. Gwynn. New York: Pearson/Penguin Academics, 2007. 43-47.
The “Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and serves as a testament to Poe’s ability to convey mental disability in an entertaining way. The story revolves around the unnamed narrator and old man, and the narrator’s desire to kill the old man for reasons that seem unexplainable and insane. After taking a more critical approach, it is evident that Poe’s story is a psychological tale of inner turmoil.
Before the narrator planned his attack he sane, “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...” (2). If you don’t like someone's physical trait it is normal to ignore it or stay away from them and the narrator is not normal he clearly shows his emotions are above and beyond what is “normal” because of how scared he got when someone looked at him. Some readers take the position that the narrator has something wrong with him.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th ed. New York: Longman, 1999. 33-37.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Tell-Tale Heart." Skwire, David and Harvey S Wiener. Student's Book of College English: Rhetoric, Reader, Research Guide and Handbook. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2012. 402-405. Print.
The behavior of the narrator in The Tell-Tale heart demonstrate characteristic that are associated with people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoid schizophrenia . When Poe wrote this story in 1843 obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia had not been discovered. However in modern times the characteristics demonstrated by the narrator leads people to believe that he has a mental illness. Poe’s narrator demonstrates classic signs throughout the story leading the reader to believe that this character is mad
“TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, like many of his works, is a dark story. Through the first person narrator, Poe uses techniques such as irony and style to pull off a believable sense of paranoia.
...binson, E. Arthur. "Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'." Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales. ED. William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. 94-102.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator attempts to assert his sanity while describing a murder he carefully planned and executed. Despite his claims that he is not mad, it is very obvious that his actions are a result of his mental disorder. Hollie Pritchard writes in her article, “it has been suggested that it is not the idea but the form of his madness that is of importance to the story” (144). There is evidence in the text to support that the narrator suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and was experiencing the active phase of said disease when the murder happened. The narrator’s actions in “The Tell-Tale Heart” are a result of him succumbing to his paranoid schizophrenia.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the storyteller tries to convince the reader that he is not mad. At the very beginning of the story, he asks, "...why will you say I am mad?" When the storyteller tells his story, it's obvious why. He attempts to tell his story in a calm manner, but occasionally jumps into a frenzied rant. Poe's story demonstrates an inner conflict; the state of madness and emotional break-down that the subconscious can inflict upon one's self.
Have you ever read the Eerie tale, “The Tale Tell Heart”, written by Edgar Allan Poe? Well if you have you would know of the brilliance of Poe’ unique mind. In the case that you have not heard
Many people who have read “The Tell Tale Heart,” argue whether or not the narrator is sane or insane. Throughout this paper I have mentioned the main reasons for the narrator being sane. The narrator experienced guilt, he also was very wary executing the plan, and the intelligence level of his plan to murder the old
“The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe.” University of Virginia, n.d. Web. 27 March, 2014.
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.
All mental illnesses, despite whatever effects they may hold, have strong impacts on the lives of those who possess it. These problems can create an unpredictable turn of events that drive the person insane and ruin their lives, but also has the possibility to make the person stronger, may it be mentally or physically. Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart is told in the position of a mentally unstable man who describes the murder he committed while hopelessly convincing the reader that he is sane. However, the relationships between characters are unclear, but there are many possible relations that seem suitable to the characters in the story. One such common deduction includes the narrator being hired as a butler by the old man, and had worked for him
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Tell-Tale Heart." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 7th ed. New York: Longman, 1999. 33-37.