The Tell-Tale Heart Insanity

Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his works displaying gothic themes, brutality, and unstable characters. The Tell-Tale Heart is one of his best known stories, involving a narrator with an irrational state of mind. The narrator takes an old man’s life, due to an obsession over his eye. The narrator lacks sufficient motivation for his murder, only that he was terrified of the old man’s eye. The narrator executes and successfully covers his murder, but eventually gets caught due to his own insanity. It becomes obvious that the narrator lacks principles of logic and reasoning in his decision to commit murder and confess to the crime, conveying his madness. The narrator opens the story by claiming he is nervous and oversensitive, not mad. He tries to prove his sanity, stating, “How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe, 27). It becomes apparent that the narrator is mad when stating how he loves the old man, “Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man” (Poe, 27). The narrator uses an unreasonable rational, further indicating his mental state of madness. He provides the rational that the old man’s eye was the reason to take his life, stating “Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and by so degrees – very gradually – I made up my
The narrators madness is ultimately conveyed through his unrealistic rational to kill the old man because of his opposition toward his eye. Similarly, another one of Poe’s stories, The Black Cat, lacks logic and reason, conveying the narrator’s madness, where the narrator kills his cat that he claims to love. In both the stories, the narrators commit atrocious crimes towards objects they love, without a normal motive to do so. As they both try to convince the reader of their sanity, they are ultimately conveyed as mad due to their lack of logic and