Sanity And Insanity Analysis

“ There’s a big difference between sanity and insanity,” a television show actress, Megan Gallagher, once stated. This statement can be seen by Edgar Allan Poe, with his story, “The Tell Tale Heart.” To begin with, the story started in the 1800s, a vexed butler, also the narrator of the story, was paranoid about an old man’s pale, blue “vulture eye.” The butler stalked the old man every night, when he fell asleep. Until one night, he made a slight noise that appalled the old man; the loud beating of the old man’s heart infuriated the butler, so he suffocated him, and dissected his corpse to hide the body under the planks of the wooden floor. At last, the butler heard noises that don’t exist, as a result, he had a mental breakdown, and confessed to the police officers that he’s the murderer. However, the butler is not guilty by reason of insanity, since he was hallucinating, paranoid about the old man’s vulture eye, and was delusional. First of all, the butler is not guilty, because he was envisioning …show more content…
For instance, the butler had no desire of the old man’s property, but he wanted to destroy the old man’s vulture eye. In addition, during the week before the old man’s murder, the butler sneaked into the old man’s bedroom every day around midnight, and stared at his eye with a lantern, just to get rid of the eye that haunted him, even in his dreams. According to the butler, he told the police during his confession in the living room, “...for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye,” (Poe, 80). In other words, the butler does not dislike the old man, or desire anything from him. However, his eye annoys the butler. He is only disturbed by his eye, because his insanity tells him that the old man’s eye is the vulture eye that could see through his soul. In brief, the butler is not guilty by reason of insanity, because the old man’s eye caused the butler to be