The Narrator's Emotional Instability In The Tell-Tale Heart

The narrator dismembers the old man’s body after making sure he was completely dead. He then proceeds to conceal his body parts underneath the floor boards and makes sure he hides all evidence from the crime. The old man’s scream from earlier caused a neighbor to report to the cops and the narrator confidently invites him to look around. He states that the screams came from him after the nightmare he had and that the old man has left after the country. Being that he was so confident that they would not find out about the murder, he provided them chairs to sit in the old man’s room, right above where his body laid and engaged in conversation with them.

After eight nights, the narrator snaps and proceeds to murder the old man. He smiles at what he has done. Although the old man was barely breathing in his final moments the narrator goes on to tell us how unbothered he was to hear the old man’s final muffled breaths. Once he is certain the old man is dead the narrator feels such a sense of relief.

The narrator thinks the old man has an evil eye, or they eye of a vulture. The narrator sneaks into the old man’s room every night and places a lantern in his room. He spies on the old man for seven nights in a row. And then finally, because of his obsession of the evil eye, He chops the old man’s body and drops the be on him. The man later confesses to the police to get rid of the stabbing.

In the baffling tales of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “My Last Duchess,” the narrators give in-depth descriptions about the characters and their surroundings. The central theme in these tales comes frightfully alive early on in the stories, but still manages to produce a dramatic ending in every tale. In each of these three first-person narratives, the narrator’s motivation to tell the tale influences the credibility of the story, which makes the narrator’s point of view, credibility, and motives, surreal to the reader.

The narrator’s motive for killing the innocent old man is unclear as he thinks it was probably his eye. Taking the life of a person, an innocent old man, because of a single feature that the narrator thought is evil or disturbing is irrational. Secondly, the narrator is affected by an unknown disease. The narrator states “Yes, I have been ill,

After the murder of the old man, the narrator cuts his limbs apart and stuffs him underneath the floorboards. While suffocating the old man, a noise is made and is heard by the neighbors. So the next thing that is heard by the narrator is the knocking on the door by the police. The narrator plays it cool and invites them and even takes them to the room in which the old man was under. He is perfectly content with them and makes small talk until the narrator notices a pounding sound. The narrator hears a beating that 's growing louder by the second, convinced that the officers can hear it as well, he confesses to the murder of the old man. Perfectly depicting the guilty conscious of the narrator, and thus proving that a guilty conscious will always overpower.

He grows furious, and tension rises. The narrator describes it as getting faster and faster, louder and louder. He finally leaps into the room, and kills the old man. Another suspenseful moment is when the guy is talking to the police. He begins to hear this ringing in his ears, and he thinks it is the old mans heart beating.

This is the case in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story in which the narrator describes to the reader his

Its reckless how he killed the old man and enjoyed it and didn’t feel no type of pain at all. The Narrator was so happy cause they eye would not bother him no more. The Narrator picked up the nasty bloody pieces of the old man, and put them in the floor so no one will find

This shows that the main character had a reason; though it wasn’t a good one, to murder the old man. The story also explained that every night the main character

At the end of the story, the narrator is sitting down with some police officers in the man's house. The police officers were called because the neighbors heard some strange noises in the night; the police officers thought that everything was alright until the narrator started to hear an ear-splitting sound the sound of a heartbeat. “Oh God! what could I do? I foamed --I raved --I swore!

     In Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the storyteller tries to convince the reader that he is not mad. At the very beginning of the story, he asks, "...why will you say I am mad?" When the storyteller tells his story, it's obvious why. He attempts to tell his story in a calm manner, but occasionally jumps into a frenzied rant. Poe's story demonstrates an inner conflict; the state of madness and emotional break-down that the subconscious can inflict upon one's self.

Perhaps the biggest element in this story is the use of irony, both verbally and dramatically. For verbal irony, we can see clearly at the end that what the narrator tells the officers and how he acts on the outside, (in a "cool manner", as he puts it) is much different than the chaos on the inside, as in what he wants to say. He sees the police as "villains" and wishes them to leave, but due to the situation, he had to keep them there. The more that he assures himself of his sanity near the end of the story and the more that he thinks that he is acting coolly, eventually leads him to reveal that he is the one that killed the old man after all. As for dramatic irony, since we know that the narrator is the one that killed the old man,

The narrator of the story suffers from heightened senses which makes the narrator despise the clouded eye of his roommate. Due to his condition, he is driven to the point of plotting the murder of the cloudy eyed man. However, the narrator argues that since he planned the deed so meticulously, he could not be crazy and that “madmen know nothing” and he was no madman. There is reason to believe he is lying about the state of his sanity because the narrator does end up killing the man to rid himself of the evil eye. Affected by his anxieties, the narrator begins to hear what he believes to be the heartbeat of the man he has murdered. The heartbeat did not create a sense of regret in the narrator, rather “it increased [his] fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.” The unreliable source of narration is due to the mental illness which allows for the narrator’s judgment to be misconstrued. Guilt of conscience is the main theme and allows for the overall character arch of the narrator as his heightened senses, or more realistically, his anxieties, are the cause of his confession. Although the narrator had killed the man, he was not evil. The narrator was not in the right mind to take action and immediately had the guilt weigh heavy on his mind, causing it to slowly collapse. Nevertheless, the narrator, for these reasons, remains unreliable and mentally

Moreover, he tries to defend his sanity by explaining how wise and cautious he was as he was preparing for the murder. Every night he checked on the old man to make sure he got everything right and get ready to execute his plan. The narration lacks of a concrete explanation of the person or place to which it is addressed, which leaves much room for interpretation for the readers. What we can infer from the story is it is not addressed to the police officers since the narrator says he was successful in making them satisfied. Finally, the climax of the story comes as the revelation of the dead body hidden under the planks. Because the story is told as a memento, our estimation might be that the narrator is addressing a court official or personage who may influence over the judgment of the narrator. Therefore, the story that the narrator is telling is most accurately realized as an appeal for mercy rather than just being an appeal to be thought sane.