Analysis Of The Narrator Account In Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

Reliability of the Narrator’s Account in Poe’s ‘The Tale-tell Heart’ ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ is a short story written by the famous writer, Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in 1843 and was revised to its present form in 1845 (Seghir, H.M., Djelloul, B., & Noureddine, B., 2013). The tell-tale Heart is a story of a murder, told by the murderer, himself. It tells about an old man who is seemingly under the care of a young person. The relationship of the characters in the story was not explicitly revealed. However, Poe gives some clues on what could have been the relationship that existed between the characters of the story. For one, the murderer has been in close contact with the old man and has been observing him intently as stated …show more content…
He is a picture of a man who is trying to convince his self and others that nothing is wrong with his mental state. However, it could not be mistaken that he is suffering from mental issues as observed in these lines: “Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” (Poe, 1843). It appears then that the narrator is disturbed as he hears many things inside his mind. At this point, the truthfulness of the narrator’s tale is already questionable. However, the detail of how he supposedly perpetrated the crime is remarkably meticulous. As observed, his intention of killing the old man started with a plan. Although the plan is not elaborate, there is an element of pre-meditated intention, which is also an important element in a murder scenario. What is puzzling though is that his intention of killing the old man is not substantiated by an objective or passion. As he, himself, said that he loved the old man only that he hates his eyes. This takes the analysis back to what it is in the eyes of the old man that makes the narrator hate him so much? The eyes, is evidently not a justifiable reason that would led a person to kill someone. It can be deduced then that at this point, the question about the narrator’s sanity is already clarified; that the narrator is, indeed, insane. However, it is important to establish what it is in the old man’s eye to make the narrator hate him so much in order to determine whether the narrator is telling a true story or is just making up some stories as a result of his distorted imagination. There were no clues as to why the narrator was annoyed with the old man’s eyes. However, it is not farfetched to speculate that the narrator may have some trauma with the old man’s eyes or similar to the old man’s eyes. The narrator may have been a close relative