Poe's Mad Men In The Tell Tale Heart By Edgar Allen Poe

Superior Essays
Dakota Rushing
Poe’s Mad Men Edgar Allen Poe lived a particularly gloomy life. Events such as the death of his parents at a very early age to being cheated on by his first fiancée threw Poe into a world of despair and darkness. Many could say this is what led Poe to write in his infamous Gothic tone. According to the Edgar Allen Poe Museum, Poe was born in Baltimore to a family of actors who traveled the country (Poe’s Life, 1). Poe was inspired to put pen to paper in a oppressive manner because of his life’s shortcomings. It was his way of escaping the real world and submerse himself into his works. Poe’s Mad Men are the offspring of his dark and plagued mind. These men come from his works, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Tell Tale
…show more content…
This is where Poe set himself apart from all other writers. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator displays eerily similar characteristics in the same situation. He starts off his story by saying that his sense of hearing is abnormally keen and questions the reader “How then am I mad” (715). These two men truly believe that they are not mad. With this Poe really brings home the fact these men are completely out of their minds. Instead of these men feeling remorse for their murders, they are attempting to persuade the audience of their sanity. With their sanity hanging in the balance, the men want the reader to be proud of their actions. Poe’s mad men are not worried about their victims and certainly are not worried about their own …show more content…
Both men in “The Black Cat”, and “The Tell Tale Heart” lead the policemen to the exact same spot where they had hidden their victim’s bodies. They lose their common sense to their bravado. Magdalen Wing-chi Ki from the Hong Kong Baptist University English Language and Literature Department calls this “ego-evil” (Wing-chi Ki,2).The men are so caught up in how well they achieved hiding the body. This is a fantastic way to convey to the audience that the men are not in their right minds. The narrator in “The Tell Tale Heart” exclaims that he “welcomed the gentlemen into his own house and that he desired the policemen to rest and stay a while” (Poe, 717) The fact that the man desired them to stick around the same place that he committed a brutal murder screams insanity. He wanted to feed his ego by convincing himself that there would be no way for the policemen to ever find him out. In the other story the mad narrator does the exact same thing. The narrator became so confident in his abilities that he had the audacity and nerve to tap his cane on the same area of the wall where the body was hidden. Poe has a niche for putting these confidently insane killers in his stories. This skill also points out loud and clear that these men are uncontrollably becoming more and more insane. The men find themselves in a constant battle of pleading their sanity and wanting to

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Edgar Allen Poe Essay “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.” (Poe, TTH 49). Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell Tale Heart show us a terrifying world of madness and murder. The sensory details to the narrator 's thoughts provide the audience with a display of mental instability and madness. From envy to obsession, these stories show equal amounts of a specific mental delusion, urging the narrator to commit an unthinkable crime.…

    • 770 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Tell Tale Identity Essay

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me.” Self-narration allows Poe to give us an insight into the narrators mind and see how the “disease had sharpened my senses”. Due to the way these narrative parts are written they begin to create an assumption within us as readers that yes the narrator is mad and this is only further validated at the end of the story. But we realise that when the narrator appeals to us as observers they are not only trying to convince us the readers of their sanity but also themselves as they are…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Also the narrator says “Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in!” which demonstrates that he is very sneaky and crafty. “ Deepening with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me” which shows that he is encountering terror as well. In “The Tell- Tale Heart” Poe develops the central idea of madness by using repetition by how the narrator cautiously plans the old man’s death. Poe uses punctuation and repetition to show how anxious, cautions, and sneaky he is.…

    • 413 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The variation of strange and disturbed characters has been a constant throughout all works of gothic fiction. In The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator murders an old man for which he has an almost familial love. It is clear that the novel’s narrator has a questionable mental state due to his weak grasp upon reality. This is seen in the way he attributes special powers to the old man’s eye and in his incomprehension towards neighbours hearing the final heartbeats of his victim. First of all, the narrator associates fictional powers with the old man’s pale blue eye.…

    • 338 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    First things first Edgar Allan Poe was a very dark and creepy writer. Most of his stories consist of death or strange things happening. In some of the stories he writes, he talks about not being mad, even know they all sound like he is mad. Poe makes comments that makes him sound very crazy, for example in the story “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrator says he didn’t want to kill the man but he must have to because of his horrible looking eye. Throughout the story he often refers to the eye as it being “evil”.…

    • 1133 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    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.…

    • 2039 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the first story that I read, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, the author describes the mental state of the main character by making the reader question why the patient has such a great obsession with the yellow wallpaper in her room. Something about the paper fascinates the patient and causes her to believe things are happening to and around her that are not at all. At one point the patient strangely described, “This bed will not move! I tried to push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece of one corner - but it hurt my teeth”(446). This shows how the patient was crazy enough to bite a part of her bed, but then state out the obvious that it hurt her teeth, even though that would have gone through…

    • 1265 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The authors, of “Rat’s in the Walls” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe respectively use their past and childhood experiences to allow a blurring of the lines on whether the narrator is trustworthy in his telling of the story or not. The era, that both Poe and Lovecraft were a part of, was the gothic era where it was the ‘craze’ to write these stories that enticed the fear of the unknown in us. This fear is what allows the reader to question whether it is reliable what they are reading from the narrator or not. In “Rats in the Walls” the narrator, a man by the name of Mr. Delapore, whereas our narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is an unnamed man. The reliability and trustworthiness of these two narrators rely on the…

    • 1269 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    An author by the name of Wing-Chi Ki M. says, Poe 's narrator is "mad" because his behavior deviates from all the moral maxims in traditional ethics, which is on the side of the good and the social order, while his drive ethics is on the side of chaos, madness, and death.” (Wing-Chi Diabolical Evil and "The Black Cat"…

    • 782 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Short stories of Edgar Allan Poe’s often have similar attributes, like being insane. For example, in “The Cask of Amontillado” he is also a murderer. His style of murder thought is more closely related to “The Tell-Tale Heart” narrator than to the narrator of “The Black Cat”. In both “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” the murder is planned. Though “The Cask of Amontillado” is also different from both the other stories.…

    • 886 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe is known for his mysterious and suspenseful short stories. His stories have an air of madness and his character development is impeccable. In the story A Tell-Tale Heart, Poe proves himself even more with his excellent character development to the unnamed narrator. He writes about the narrator who believes himself not to be mad, but is motivated to kill a man because the man's eye scares him. This essay will discuss the character development of the narrator, and how he copes with madness.…

    • 2413 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One’s Marriage, The Eye and Faith When texting someone, emojis are straightforward, with a laughing emoji symbolizing laughter and clocks representing a clock. On a heart rate monitor, a flashing heart would symbolize the human heart beating in real time. In short stories however, symbols are more ambiguous. The symbols need more time to be identified and explained to those who do not see them.…

    • 1076 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Think about this; it is your last night on Earth and you are sitting in a jail cell with a heavy burden on your chest that you can’t help but to think about. The world sees you as crazy, but you know you’re sane. How would you prove your innocence? In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat” this scenario is put to the test. In the story, the reader is introduced to an unnamed narrator who is writing about how he got to this low point.…

    • 1143 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The disease had sharpened my senses -- not destroyed -- not dulled them. ”(Poe 1) This quote demonstrates the reasoning behind the narrator’s justification of his sanity. He believes that in order for him to be insane his senses must be dulled or deteriorating, so how can he be mad if he could pull off such an elaborate crime. By illustrating the internal conflict of the narrator, Poe addresses a popular question that we may never know the answer to.…

    • 864 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” are frightening stories told by nameless narrators. Both narrators, who are clearly disturbed, commit murder in the stories. Through the narrators’ accounts of the events leading up to their respective crimes, Poe’s tales explore themes of abnormal psychology and give the reader insight into the minds and thought processes of two fictional perpetrators of homicide. The two narrators are very similar in their character and in their actions, and both of their stories reflect Romantic ideology.…

    • 1394 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays

Related Topics