The Tell-Tale Heart Response Essay

“The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is a traumatizing story about a person who murdered an innocent old man because he thought that his eye was evil. The story states that the narrator was afraid of the eye and that is why he wanted to rid himself of it. The narrator had many signs of being proven to go to jail or to go to a mental hospital. The narrator planned out the murder long before he did it. As he was about to explain how he completed his task, he sounded quite proud. He did make sure to point out that he is not mad and did what he thought was right. “If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.” He remembered all of the things he did the night of the crime. Signs of a mental illness are memory loss. He must be sane if he could clearly state what happened without hesitation. The narrator does not seem one hundred percent trustworthy though. He could be seen as mental for this
He stalked the old man for seven long nights at midnight. For an hour he would carefully and quietly watch the old man as he slept waiting for him to open his eye so he could swiftly get rid of it instantly. “And that I did every night for seven nights - every night just at midnight - but i found the eye always looked closed.” On the eighth night, the narrator accidentally made a noise and the old man awoken and was terrified because he knew someone was watching him. When the narrator thought it was the right moment, he did what he had been planning to do. After, he dismembered the body in his bathtub so no blood was spotted and stuffed it under the floorboard. He carefully thought that all out. What a frightening idea. He could still be proven mad even after all of these insane acts. His mind could have made him think that this was the appropriate way to act because he strongly believed that the eye was