Tell Tale Heart Guilt

In the short story The Tell-Tale Heart, the author Edgar Allan Poe compels the reader to contemplate that sometimes in treacherous circumstances people may attempt to rationalize their actions to absolve themselves of their guilt. The author portrays this theme through the main characters efforts to disconnect himself from his motives, to rationalize his actions, and the self pride in his conduct of events. The concept that when someone feels guilty they may attempt to disconnect themselves from their motives becomes clear at the beginning of the story through the narrators attempt to convince the reader and supposedly himself of his sanity. He also attempted to disconnect himself from his actions, through blaming the murder of the old man on the evil eye, also suggesting that in his …show more content…
He says this this to convince himself that he could not possibly be mad, as he is nothing like a madman, and that the amount of planning he put into the homicide, in divergence to acting on impulse, validates the separation. This illustrates that people may attempt to disconnect themselves from their motives, by creating as much separation from what occurred and their motive for doing it in order to convince themselves of their sanity. Along with trying to separate oneself from their motives, people may try to rationalize their actions, to absolve themselves of some of their guilt. The narrators attempt to rationalize his actions because increasingly clear as The Tell Tale Heart progresses. In the third paragraph, when the narrator undoes the lantern, just enough for a thin ray of light to shine upon the eye, he stated that “It was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his evil eye.”, suggesting that what he was doing was justified, because he was not killing the man for that purpose but to rid himself of the evil