A Tell Tale Heart Response

Anthony Durham
Section 201420
Mrs. Sandi Van Lieu Greene
June 11, 2014
A Tell-Tale Heart
Have you ever been consumed by a thought and all you can think about is this certain thing, it engulfs your mind and soon this is all you can think about? This thought eventually leads your mind to go crazy, leaving you plotting ways to accomplish the thing that has consumed your mind until you act on it. That is what happened to the unnamed narrator of the story, “A Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator is driven mad by his own thoughts of the old man that he lived with. There are many lessons that can be taken from this short story. The lessons that we can take from this story are, how our thoughts can become all-consuming and lead us to
In this story the narrator was driven mad by the thoughts that he let fester in his mind about a pale blue eye of his old roommate. He states that it reminded him of a vulture eye. (Poe), The narrator never feels wronged or insulted by the old man, he actually loved the old man. He was just consumed and driven mad by his eye. The mere sight of his eye planted deep, consuming and horrific thoughts in the narrators mind and it kept digging at him each day. The deeper the thought dug the more he went mad. The irony of this is he spends quite a bit of time trying to convince the audience that he is not a “madman” but merely nervous. This reminds me of the thought process of serial killers. Generally, they get an idea in their heads and it becomes consuming and snowballs into something huge and horrific. Take Ted Bundy for example, he felt that violence in the media and the pornographic movies and magazines were the "roots" of his crimes. Right before Ted Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989, he granted an interview to psychologist James Dobson. In that interview he described the agony of his addiction to pornography. He stated that “In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside.” “Once you
The young man talks about the caution that he used when disposing of the body. He dismembered the old man, then carefully lifted the floorboards and disposed of the body parts. He prides himself on how he got not a single drop of blood anywhere. He started to feel confident that he was going to get away with his crime. Suddenly, there was a knock at the door; it was the Police. When the Police came in, the narrator being filled with confidence, showed them around as to try to prove with his calm nature, that there was nothing wrong. The young man also seemed to become a little over confident and that he could get away with this. He went to the extreme of having the Police sit down in the same room, and placed his chair over the exact spot that the body laid beneath. At first he seemed to stay really calm, but as the Police carried on asking questions and writing things down, he became very nervous. The narrator then started to hear sounds and thought it was the heartbeat of the deceased old man beneath the floorboards. His guilty conscience convinced his mind that everyone in the room could hear the same sound. His demeanor began to change and his mind started to break down. I’m sure the police could tell that he was acting funny so they continued to hang around