Moral Insanity In Poe's Tell-Tale Heart

According to The Poetry Foundation, Poe is considered as “the architect of the modern short story,” and “Tell-Tale Heart” is a powerful tale of psychological terror is one of “his best and best-known works.” David R. Saliba has disagreed that Poe’s “structural omission of an objective viewpoint for the reader [in Tell-Tale Heart] forces the reader to experience the tale with no point of reference outside the framework of the story”. Everyone can read a text with an external sense of reality; all audiences bring some of their external frame of reference to the literal text. For Poe’s audience in the 1840s, that frame of hint would have included a knowledge of a contentious new disease known as ‘moral insanity’ and of the philosophical dilemmas that surrounded its detection. The narrator in Tell-Tale Heart is a morally insane man, and, through the language of his narration, Poe would have predicted his readers to detect the symptoms of that insanity. In addition to that, the story's efficiency, predominantly, relies on its narrative structure and style, both of which reveal
The tale revolves around the narrator's will to murder the old man for unexplainable and insane reasons, which shows that Tell-Tale Heart is a psychological short story of inner conflicts and madness. Poe primarily expressed the protagonist’s battles to work out his own inner conflicts. John Chua claims: “The idea of the protagonist fighting a counterpart occurs so often in Poe’s work that critics often suggest that the battles represent Poe’s attempts to work out, through his own inner conflicts and psychological struggles.” (Chua, 1.) This is shown by the controversial arguments that the narrator has with himself within his own head, which continue throughout the story. As the story starts, the narrator argues with himself that he is not mad. He starts out by saying