Critical Analysis on the Tell Tale Heart

Insanity since birth? It is common and fairly often to hear of many cases similar to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tale Tale Heart.” Often it is heard of that a murderer is released from jail due to ‘mental illness’ or and ‘insanity claim’. No one ever knows whether or not a person is truly insane or just claiming to be. However, the person’s actions and reasoning for those actions is what helps indicate and reveal true insanity, as some may not always have been insane, but certain events and aspects in a person’s life could result in character reaching a breaking point, or in this case insanity. The words Poe has chosen to use in context along the descriptive imagery of the old man’s pale, blue vulture-like eye are extremely effective in showing the narrator turned insane from being around the eye for such a long period of time. In the story, the narrator explains, “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.” (Poe 37) The narrator has nothing against the old man, as the man was always kind to him, but the eye itself leads to the murders mental disturbance. The narrator develops an obsession with this hideous eye, and can no longer control it, leading to the murder of his companion. The fact is that he develops this obsession over time, never having it before. The eye is this evil object in the narrator’s life that feeds the narrator’s hatred. “It was open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed upon it.” (Poe 38) The narrator’s hatred grew for the eye the more he looked at that moment in the bedroom but also over a period of time. Up until this point, the narrator had never thought of killing the old man, but the eye had slowly made him more nervous and anxious when around the old man. What began as a disturbance in the narrator’s life turned into an obsession. It appears that the eye had begun