Edgar Allen Poe, in this story, shows that personality disorders if not attended to, can lead to insanity. In an attempt to clearly show this, he uses an elaborate plot, descriptive language and brings out his main character in a puzzling manner. “The Tell-Tale Heart’’ could classify as a morality tale that criticizes the rationales and gothic.
Poe's mind is known to be “warped” and this story just confirms that. He features dark themes, violence, and a psychologically unstable character, who kills someone because he can’t stand their eyes. Poe begins his story with a scene where the narrator blatantly insists that he is not mad; that he just has a disorder that allows him to hear things that happen on earth as well as in hell. This statement alone shows us, the readers, even before we finish reading he story, that the narrator might actually be insane on some levels. The story is actually set in the mind of the narrator and as the story unfolds the reader can see that the narrator is not of sound mind as he claims to be hearing the heartbeat of a man that has already been pronounced dead. It is certain that this is solely coming from his own tortured imagination (Shen 23).
In “The Tell Tale Heart” it is intriguing that both the police and the suspect were so calm while investigating the crime scene. As the narrator said, "For what had I to fear? Of course this opinion did change until he started going mad by hearing the old man's heart beating. This forced his face to go pale. It is quite evident that Edgar Allan Poe has done his best to describe "the after-life in a fictional way. The story, “The Tell Tale Heart”, clearly show Poe's belief in the “Next Life”. Also, the contrast between the policemen and the “madman” is very evident. Poe once again attempts to show the difference between the insane and the rational. Poe shows well his opinion that a madman does not necessarily have to look mad, he may be may look quite normal (Shen 346).
The narrator’s sanity is questionable from the word go and as the story unfolds we really see that he is indeed insane. However, he has trouble admitting to the fact that he has a condition that need to be attended to. Poe somehow depicts what is seen in today’s society. Many people who suffer from mental illness never acknowledge they are mentally ill, until it’s too late. At the end of the narrative there is a metaphoric noise that symbolizes the guilt felt by the killer.
The main ideas and issues that are addressed in this story are mental illness/sanity and the struggles that people who suffer from mental illnesses go through. We see that the narrator did actually confess that there could be forces that compel him to act violently and he can’t control them, but it is indeed too late when he admits that he has a problem. The opening of the story, where the narrator is quoted admitting that he had been dreadfully nervous but at the same time wondering why anyone would think he's mad, despite his actions, already tells us that he may be mentally unstable (Symons 45).
Works Cited
Gargano, James W. "The Question of Poe's Narrators." College English 25.3 (2003): 177-181.
Poe, Edgar Allan, and Edward Hutchins Davidson. Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 11. Houghton Mifflin College Division, 2006.
Shen, Dan. "Edgar Allan Poe's Aesthetic Theory, the Insanity Debate, and the Ethically Oriented Dynamics of ““The Tell-Tale Heart””." Nineteenth-Century Literature 63.3 (2008): 321-345.
Symons, Julian. The tell-tale heart: the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. Harpercollins, 2008.
