Insanity In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a story about a madman driven to murder because of his own twisted mind and paranoia over the simplest of things. However, moreso it is a story about the struggle with one’s own mind and the madness that lies within it. The narrator of the story is a man who, for one reason or another, has been given shelter by a kindly old man who he, or so he claims, loves. In the narrator’s own mind and with his paranoia he sees something that throws him into a mad spiral of anxiety; The man’s bright blue eye terrify him when he looks into them, prompting him to do his despicable acts. To understand the narrator and his actions it must be pointed out that, throughout the story, he vehemently denies being mad. He reasons that a madman would not be so clever as to do what he had done or to carry out the crime so carefully …show more content…
While this is partially true, being that the man is definitely insane, the true reason he is thrown into the depths of his own madness is his inability to come to terms with his abnormality. He looks at it as a sort of gift, saying he is not mad, only more perceptive than the rest. He has even seemingly convinced himself that his hallucinations, like the heartbeat beneath the floorboards, are things everyone else can sense as well. The narrator is still trying to convince himself that he is normal while at the same time trying to convince his audience, those who are listening to his mad ramblings. Even the writing style taken on by Poe seems to portray this in some way with its frequent skipping over events and focusing heavily on recurring themes and patterns in how the narrator does his actions. This is without a doubt, a great testament to Poe’s brilliance as a writer, being able to capture the story in not only his words, but how he writes them