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Unreliable Narrator In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Decent Essays

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are commonly described a creepy, weird, and insane just like him. Poe was a very dark, untrustworthy person and that projected in his stories. Because of this his stories have unreliable narrators, or people you can not trust who are telling the story. In the story, The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator kills a person, has to explain his sanity, and has a well thought out murder plan. Only an insane person would do any of these things. This clearly shows the narrator is unreliable.
In, The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator killed an old man and hid his body parts under the floorboards. A person has to be completely insane to kill a person for no particular reason. The narrator says, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me an insult” (7-8.) The narrator killed an innocent person just because the man's eye was like, “The eye of a vulture” (9,) and it haunted him. When a character in a story has no legal right or a good reason to kill someone but does anyway, it is a good sign they are mentally insane. …show more content…

“But why will you say I am mad?” (1-2,) says the narrator. The narrator is trying to gain sympathy for himself because he is clearly guilty of a gruesome crime. When a narrator has to explain how he is not insane, the narrator is usually an unreliable one. A reader can not trust a narrator if the he or she has to claim his sanity. The narrator says, “How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (4-5.) The narrator is trying to prove that he is not insane by saying how calm he is, when really he is very

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