The Tell Tale Heart Rhetorical Analysis

The story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is about an unnamed man who is appalled by an old man’s eye and is ultimately led to kill the old man because of it. At the beginning of the story, the man exclaims that he is not a madman and he was very careful when committing this terrible act. For a week, the man cracks the door to the old man's home, sticks his lantern inside so he can see the man, and watches him while he sleeps. On the eighth night, the old man is awakened by the sound of the man outside watching him. At this time, the man knows that it is his time to act so he runs inside, throws the old man on the floor and pulls his bed on top of him so he will be smothered. After the deed is done, he carefully dismembers his body …show more content…
He states “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded — with what caution — with what foresight — with what dissimulation I went to work!” (Poe, 715) By claiming that he took much caution into what he was doing and that he was wise about it shows that even though what he was doing was wrong, he still knew he had to be careful about getting caught. A part of him was still acting like a normal human being even though his thoughts and his mind were controlling what he was doing. Poe also talks about how wise he is when he says “I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunning, that no human eye — not even his — could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out — no stain of any kind — no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught it all — ha! ha!” (717) Even though this is showing how careful and smart he is about all of his actions, it is also showing how unusual his thoughts are. A normal human being would not think about killing a person, much less how to carefully kill a person so that no evidence is