Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'

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Jarna Ware American Literature TR 2-3:15 Professor Michael April 21, 2016 “The Tell-Tale Heart” Research Paper “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a short story where the narrator tries to convince the readers of his sanity. Throughout the story the narrator says he is not insane while giving reasons to why he is not. The narrator wanted to prove his sanity because he murdered the old man for being afraid of his eye. While telling the readers about the event and trying to prove his sanity, the narrator begins to show psychological aspects from Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche which include the id, ego, and superego. According to Psychology and Life, “the id is the unconscious part of the personality that represents …show more content…

Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard many 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” (Poe 92). It is the ego because if a person was insane then they would not be able to tell the story of a murder that was committed. The narrator is capable of telling the reader’s about why he killed the old man, how he killed the old man, and where the old man’ s body …show more content…

“...every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened, oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head” (Poe 92). This is the superego because the id wanted to satisfy the needs of the narrator by getting rid of the eye, but the superego was stopping him from acting. The narrator had no problems with the old man, but he would watch him sleep because he was afraid that the eye would hurt him. Every night the narrator went into the old man’s room to see, but could not do anything because he could not see the eye since the old man’s eyes were closed. If it were not for the superego the narrator would have killed the old

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