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

Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his works displaying gothic themes, brutality, and unstable characters. The Tell-Tale Heart, one of his best known stories, involves an irrational narrator. The narrator kills an old man due to an obsession the narrator has with the man’s eye. The narrator lacks sufficient motivation for the murder, only that he was terrified of the old man’s eye. The narrator successfully executes his plan, but eventually gets caught due to his own paranoia.

However, it was his own insanity that eventually turned him into the police. At the beginning of the story we get a glimpse of the unstableness of the narrator as he constantly feels the need to remind us that he is not mad. With this in mind, we can also assume that he may have been trying even harder to convince himself of the lie. Throughout the story, the narrator calmly describes his experience with murdering an old man due to the disgust he had for his eye. We can easily assume that this point of view is unreliable as we see the constant paranoia the narrator depicts each night as he stood in the man’s room. Also, we can believe that the narrator is quite proud of the plan he contrived, and the way in which he executed it. However, due to his mental illness, he eventually gives himself up to the authorities because of his claims of hearing the dead man’s beating heart. That being the case, “The Tell Tale Heart” is a great example of unreliable

He shows signs of being a psychotic murderer and shows obsession, but yet tries to cover the insanity up by calling it “being wise”. If he can’t come to terms with his own mental sanity then how could anything he says be considered reliable? In the beginning of the short story, the narrator argues that he is not mad because of the simple fact he is able to tell his side of the story in such a calm manner. Another example to his insanity is at the end of the story while speaking with the police officers; he was hearing the heartbeat of the old man he just murdered. As a result of hearing the pounding heart, he revealed to the officers where the body of the old man was. A sane person wouldn’t have let a deceptive sound create his downfall. In addition to the narrator’s questionable sanity, the amount of time and effort he put into planning and executing the old man’s murder without reason further confirms how unreliable he

A unreliable narrator is someone who lies and deceives, the reader. In addition to that a narrator who is insane is also a unreliable narrator. In the short stories that we have read, including Strawberry Spring, by Stephen King where a mentally ill college student starts going on a killing spree during the strawberry spring where the winter warms and there is a lot of fog.The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is which is about a hallucinating woman in a large estate where she is being held by her husband and being captivated in a room for her 0“sickness” of having oppressive thinking and ideas., and A Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe which is about a madman who watched a old man sleep for 7 days straight in the night and then killed him on the 8th because of his “vulture eye”. All of the narrators are mentally insane, therefore rendering each narrator unreliable. Each of which being in their own way. The most unreliable narrator is from A Tell Tale heart by Edgar Allen Poe because he is in denial about his mental health and rationalizes criminal behavior.

As Madchen Amick, an American actress, once said, “It is possible and very common to overcome and manage a mental illness,” unfortunately, for a specific group of narrators this was not the case. While reading three stories, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Strawberry Spring by Stephen King, there is two commonalities throughout all of these stories, the narrators are all mentally ill and in turn, unreliable. It is hard to judge who is the most unreliable between the selection of twisted stories, whither it be the murderer who does not know what he has done at a college campus in the story Strawberry Spring, or the man who’s plotted to murder an old man due to paranoia about the old man’s eye in the story Tell Tale Heart, or the lady

The most unreliable narrator is from the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe because of the killing and

In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, the main character, the narrator, kills the old man because he disliked his eye. He claims his motivation is neither the old man wronging him nor desire for money, but rather a fear of the man’s pale blue eye. The narrator insists that he is not crazy, even though he goes to the elderly man’s apartment and observes the man sleeping. The narrator shows clear signs of insanity by having no reason or killing the old man, confessing to the perfect crime, and enjoying murdering an innocent person.

A murderer isn’t insane for killing someone, but they are wrong to do so, a mentally insane person is different from one who has a few mental illnesses connected to mental insanity. The Tell-Tale Heart is a horror story told through the eyes of the nameless killer, simply known as the narrator. In The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator kills a man whom he is supposed to take care of due to disliking his “Evil Eye.” Though it sounds like an insane reason for killing someone, it doesn’t mean his mentality is. The narrator’s state of mind in The Tell-Tale Heart is completely sane because the narrator kills with full intentions of killing him, he intentionally hid the evidence of his murder so he wouldn’t be convicted, and most importantly,

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart emphasizes the use of an ironic, unreliable narrator and how individual moral standards cause discrepancies in determining sanity. The narrator, who is not the same figure as the author, clearly states that he is aware of the crime committed and refuses that the definition of madness does not fit him. The murderer is somewhat sane in the sense that he was in control of his actions, but being “mad” or “deranged” continues to cause problems determining if he is ultimately culpable. First, a somewhat serious form of sarcasm used by the criminal actually constructs a contradicting notion about his plot.

Because of his meticulous steps, we can conclude that the narrator in not insane because he knows that he is

For example, the narrator admits, in the first sentence, to being dreadfully nervous, yet he is unable to comprehend why he should be thought mad. He articulates his resistance against madness in terms of heightened sensory capacity. Unlike the similarly nervous and hypersensitive Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” who admits that he feels mentally unwell, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” views his hypersensitivity as proof of his stability, not a symptom of insanity. This special knowledge enables the narrator to tell this tale in a precise and complete manner, and he uses the stylistic tools of narration for the purposes of his own sanity plea. However, what makes this narrator mad—and most unlike Poe—is that he fails to understand the coupling of narrative form and content.

Without that initial statement, why would we think him mad? Then he says; "Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing." How does he know that madmen know nothing? I wrote in my own journal once; "Insanity is not madness. Sanity is madness, if one can distinguish the difference between sanity and insanity, does that not then make you sane?" So then, if the narrator questions our thoughts on his sanity, he must then know the difference or that there is a difference between sanity and insanity, does that not then create some question as to his own sanity? I think from the very beginning he questioned his own sanity to himself thereby creating the question of insanity to the reader! Isn't that insane? (ha ha) But was he insane? Insane is defined in Webster's New Concise Dictionary as: "Not Sane; mentally deranged or unsound. Set apart for demented persons. Not Whole." OK, well we still cannot prove that he was or was not insane. Was he a psychopath? Some would say yes, most definitely. But what is a psychopath? Psychopaths have a character type that enables them to pursue pleasure with indifference to the suffering they cause others. Psychopaths are completely lacking such virtues as benevolence and compassion. In this story, the narrator says; "I loved the old man.

In the first few paragraphs of the story, the narrator makes a point of rejecting the idea that he is mad. It almost seems as if he goes out of his way to reassure readers that he is indeed sane. It was at this point that I first got an inclination that the narrator was unreliable, either because he is insane, or just lying. The average person who

Some readers may argue that the narrator is sane because he constantly explains that his actions are sane. However, the narrator is actually insane because the actions that he justifies are very abnormal. The narrator explains that he concealed the body by, “ First of all, [dismembering] the corpse. [He] cut off the head and the arms and the legs” (Poe l 133-134). Clearly, the narrator’s actions mentioned above are not normal. No sane person would be proud of how carefully they concealed a dead body. The narrator is just trying to explain his peculiar actions in a normal way, which he hopes will convince the reader he is sane. Although the narrator justifies himself, the actions he carried out are not even something a sane person would do, therefore making him insane.

An unreliable narrator is a narrator that necessarily cannot be trusted by the way they talk, and or the way they describe the way certain events occurred. You cannot believe everything an unreliable narrator says. Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are unreliable because they are both mentally ill or have a serious problem with drinking. When reading a story you want to know all the details correctly and an unreliable narrator can change your understanding of the story, which both of the narrators do in the two short stories. The narrator's show a lot of evidence that they are both unreliable because of their sicknesses.