Tell Tale Heart Psychopath

Improved Essays
The narrator quoted in the Tell Tale Heart "Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story." The narrator in Tell Tale Heart is a Psychopath. This is because the narrator has these psychopathic traits grandiose self-worth and shallow affect. Also the narrator shows lack or remorse or guilt which can she shown by the quote above. Some other traits the narrator shows are pathological lying, impulsivity, parasitic lifestyle, conning and manipulativeness.(Poe, Edgar Allan.) ("A-)
The narrator doesn't show any guilt for killing the man with the vulture eye. Also the narrator doesn't cringe when he is cutting up the body in the bathtub. He/she is just down right cold hearted. The narrator showed a lot of shallowness

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    In “The Tell- Tale Heart”, the narrator is introduced by trying to prove his sanity to the readers. The narrator admits that due to his strong powerful sense of hearing, "he can hear all things in the heaven and in the earth and many things in hell.” This proves to us that the narrator is not focusing on reality because of his sick mind. The narrator shows a desperate need to prove his sanity to everyone by constantly reminding his readers that he is sane. He even tells a story of a pointless murder just to prove he’s not mad.…

    • 154 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The short story Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Alan Poe is a first person narrative about the murder of an old man with a glass eye. The story begins with the narrator trying to convince the reader he is sane. He explains that his accuracy in killing him means that he could not possibly be insane. The message the narrator tries to convey is contradicted by the tone and intensity of how he tells his story.…

    • 383 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “How do you show someone real love when you don’t know what it feel like” (Dexter). Two stories “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, and Dexter by Jeff Lansing both depict characters that have conflicting emotions caused by insanity. In “The Tell Tale Heart”, the main character is insane; this drives him to kill a man. After he is finished he makes sure there is no evidence. But when the police come he is overcome with a ringing noise in his head that pushes him past the edge and he snaps, telling the police that he is guilty.…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Secondly, a man who eats others is not a reliable source for a recollection of events. Thus our narrator, Mr. Delapore, turns out to be an unreliable source of narration. Next, in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, our narrator, who Edgar Allan Poe left unnamed, forces the reader to scepticism about the reliability of the narrator. This is because in the first paragraph he says: “True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them.…

    • 1269 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Dancing Within Sanity Through the discourse of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Tell Tale Heart, both wrapped up and enclosed in the open space that entails its given genre, Gothic Literature. However, despite its given distinction of characters, settings, gender, and action, both are dually intertwined in regards to the nature each narrative and plot takes. The Tell-Tale Heart illustrates and manifests itself with a distinct narrator with a kind of “split nature”, a man who can perhaps be described as suffering from an intense form of paranoia, while the latter denoting an exacerbation of a mental condition and ultimately concluding with a paradoxical and freeing insanity, yet despite such unintended respite, both alike through the…

    • 1730 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The tell-tale heart The tell-tale heart was a mysterious book. It seems that the narrator was as crazy as a Christmas nut. The way the story is laid out give it more of a sense of mystery. Later the narrator killed the old man just because his vulture eye.…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “I then smile gaily, to find the deed so far done.” (Poe, 384) “I put a dark lantern, all closed, closed so that no light shone out.” (Poe, 382) “Why would they not be gone?” (Poe, 386) After he kills the old man, his excitement and cheerful feelings are rising. This shows how little empathy he has for the old man and how he is mentally unstable.…

    • 804 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    But this disease was no burden to him, to him it was more of a gift. The narrator thought of this disease as a gift granted to himself after seeing the vulture eye. It was this vulture eye that deceived the narrator into believing his actions, his plan to murder the old man were justified. Tension builds along with his madness in the story. The narrator is convinced he is…

    • 1742 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    While this admittedly seems plausible, the narrator of the tell-tale heart is sane because he does not have the characteristics it takes to be legally insane. Some of these characteristics are that he doesn't know what he's doing is wrong, that he unaware of surroundings, that his actions have illogical reasons or not reasons at all, that he is confused about daily life, that his emotions are above and beyond what is normally expected for a given situation, that he is unable to resist impulses. The Tell-Tale heart narrator is very sane.…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Along with these question, there is a sense of anxiety, and the narrators become more obsessed with the physical attributes of those they have faults with (Badenhausen 492). However, there are other theorists who will say that Poe’s main characters could be considered…

    • 166 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He is not a reliable narrator because he is emotionally unstable. Poe heightens the tension and fear running through the mind of the narrator. There is a clear connection between the language used by the narrator and his psychological state. The narrator switches between calm, logical statements and quick, irrational outbursts. Poe effectively conveys panic in the narrator’s voice, and the reader senses uneasiness and growing tension in the story.…

    • 749 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This proves the character to be very cautious and attentive. One example in particular that stands out is when the narrator accidently wakes the old man, and says, “For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and I did not hear him lay down. He was still sitting-up; listening” (Poe105). This quote proves the killer to be very attentive.…

    • 675 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The thing that caught my eye the most in The Tell-Tale Heart is the constant use of repetition of adverbs and adjectives to not only intensify the occurrence but to place and draw the reader deeper in the mad mind of the narrator. The narrator is carefully planning the murder of the old man that he felt had an evil eye, the reality of the eye being evil and being the eye of vulture is not the focus of the story, we follow the narrator's logic and perception. The reader is made aware of the narrator’s unstable mind through the use of repetition throughout the entire story that intensifies his paranoia and nervousness and being scared of the old man's eye to the point of killing him for it even though the man never did anything wrong to him.…

    • 996 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Brad MacFee ENGL-102-75A 12/3/2017 Essay #4 How the Tell-Tale Signs of Schizophrenia Provide a Motive for Killing “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, features a schizophrenic narrator who recounts the sequence of events leading up to the murder of an old man and his eventual confession to the murder. Throughout the story, the narrator exhibits many strange behaviors that suggest that he is quite abnormal. For example, the narrator describes his extreme vendetta against, not the old man, but his “evil eye,” (Edgar Allan Poe). By the end of the story, the narrator has a friendly conversation with the police about the old man until he begins hearing a ringing sound that he says progressively grew in volume. The increasing volume of the sound led him to ultimately lash out in confession to the murder of the old man.…

    • 1851 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allen Poe wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart” and this is a short story narrative told by the narrator describing a murder that he commits. The narrator is trying to `explain how he is sane but has over-acuteness of senses. He lives with an old man who has a vulture-like eye that drives the narrator to kill the old man. The narrator watches the old man for 7 days, and, on the 8th night, when he accidently wakes the old man, and reveals his vulture eye, the narrator attacks and smothers the old man to death.…

    • 1633 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays