What Is The Unreliable Narrator In The Tell Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart is a story written by Edgar Allen Poe and is a story which I’m pretty sure, much like many other mandatory school readings like Shakespeare and Thatcher, that many of you have read and most of you have forgotten, myself included. To recap the tale, and summarize for those of you who actually haven’t read it, the Tell-Tale Heart follows the story of a man who tries his best to convince us he is not crazy whilst he plots to murder someone for the sole reason that one specific detail of the man displeases him. The story literally opens up with the man asking us if we will think him mad once the story is over, in fact it references a disease afflicting the man himself clueing us in that this man might be an unreliable narrator. The written language of the text definitely harkens back to around the 1800s with specific mention going to the placement of words in sentences and the significance of certain aspects of the Christian mythos, which was quite popular back then. an example of the aforementioned language goes as such: “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” (-The Tell-Tale Heart pg 1.) The story progresses with the man relaying to us the information that he is in fact most definitely not mad, simply diseased, and of an idea of his that, once again, …show more content…
What was the lesson to be learned from this story? To be honest, this story really has no lesson. The tell-Tale Heart has no deeper meaning behind most of its words, much like a lot of Edgar Allen Poe’s writing. This particular brand of story is what we like to call a pointless tragedy, or as TvTropes.com would put it a “Shaggy Dog Story”. In the end, The Tell-Tale Heart contributes very little to an overarching cannon, and its tale is simply that of a dying old man, and the definitely and 100% sane man he took