The Tell-Tale Heart Crazy

Let's talk about Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," a
Short story. He starts off with the narrator speaking directly to us, and he says, "True! -- nervous -- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" And here we find out this speaker's purpose. What he wants to do is convince us that he is not mad. Mad here does not mean angry, it means insane. So the whole time he's saying, "I'm not insane. I killed someone, but I'm not insane. I put the body in the floorboards, after carefully chopping it up, but I'm not insane." And of course, the more he talks, the more we're convinced that he is indeed crazy, mentally ill, insane. Now, Poe manages to create this voice, this character, who is telling us this, and

When he arrives, the old man wakes up. So this time the old man is awake and frightened, and makes a sound, and his moan reminds our narrator of the moan he used to make sitting up in the middle of the night, hearing the "death watches" in the wall. Now he's not talking about watches like you wear on your wrist to tell the time. He's talking about the beetles in the wall that make little knocking sounds. So he hears those beetles, that made him feel lonely, made him feel like making this sound, this soul-wrenching sound, the same sound he's hearing from this old man. Finally, he opens the little door of his lamp and allows a little light to shine onto the man, and it lands exactly on the eye. And it says, "at length, a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye." And then the eye is open. "It was open -- wide, wide open -- and I grew furious as I gazed upon it." So he's doesn't see the old man. In fact, he says, "I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot," meaning the eye. Here he thinks he's going to