The Tell-Tale Heart Central Idea Analysis

In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, there are many key central ideas throughout the entirety of the story. These consist of guilt, madness, and obsession. Though all of those ideas are seen predominantly through the story, the biggest central idea is the narrator’s madness. The reason for this is because his madness was there from the first word and there until the last word. His madness was the idea that Poe conveyed the best and described in more details. The madness also drove him to kill the old man’s eye. Thus, without the factor of madness, the of killing the old man would have never happened. This is why the narrator’s madness was the most important central idea in the short story. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, from the first words of the first paragraph, the reader sees that the narrator has something wrong in his head. He begins by stating “Nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous” and “[H]ow calmly I can tell you the whole story” meaning that he is covering up that he is mad and stating that he is only nervous, but also calm. The narrator tells
Though Poe adds in the other central ideas about obsession and guilt, the driving force under those ideas is the narrator’s madness. The reason this is, is because madness drove the narrator to obsess over the eye and the obsession drove the killing which made the guilt of the narrator. This makes the madness of the narrator the most important of the central ideas and the whole basis of the story. His madness makes the whole chain of events unfold. Poe develops the madness by making the narrator call himself sane and normal, but sprinkle in little details that shed light on his true disposition. The whole idea of the narrator hiding his madness was to reveal that the whole time he was criminally insane and not very well in the