Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of the most famous short stories ever written. It tells the story from the first-person point of view of the narrator, a man who has, the reader finds out, killed a blind, elderly man and hidden his body under the floor. The narrator spends most of the short story trying to convince the reader that he is not mad, and offers the reader a variety of different reasons why he should be considered sane; however, with every attempt to convince the reader of his sanity, the narrator appears to be more and more mad. His madness is eventually revealed to the reader as he begins to have auditory hallucinations brought on by the pressure and the guilt of what he has done to the old man.
At the very beginning of the text, the narrator 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” (Poe). Even here, in the first sentence of the story, the narrator is contradicting himself: first, he says he is not mad, but then he acknowledges that he does, indeed, have a disease. This contradiction is carried on throughout the text, with the narrator becoming increasingly contradictory and confusing as he begins to hallucinate the sound of the heart under the floor. The narrator says, “The ringing became more distinct: --It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness --until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears No doubt I now grew very pale; --but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice” (Poe). It is easy to imagine the narrator during this scene, talking very quickly with a lot of emotion. It is certainly not the type of action that someone who is sane would take in the case of trying to avoid detection by the police. This is why it seems that the narrator, whether he was always mad or the guilt drove him to madness, is indeed insane.
The proof of sanity offered by the narrator is unconvincing at best, and detrimental to his insistence of sanity at worst. He protests his sanity so long and so vigorously that even if he had not killed a man because of his eye, the reader would be suspicious of his mental acuity. As it is, knowing that the narrator has killed a man and buried him under the floorboards, his insistence is even less convincing than it would have been otherwise. The narrator describes very carefully how he snuck into the old man's room and killed him, and offers this to the reader as proof that he is not insane. However, killing a man who seems to have done nothing wrong because his eyes upset the narrator is the action only a madman would take.
The narrator is very clearly mad for the duration of the short story, and every “proof” of sanity he offers is, in fact, proof that he is insane. While he knows that his actions were wrong, he felt compelled to kill the old man anyway; he is clearly very paranoid about the presence of evil and feels that his actions were, at the very least, justifiable, if not correct. A sane man would spend the whole short story protesting that he was innocent of the crime that the police had accused him of, or that his actions were justifiable in some way. The narrator in Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” on the other hand, is more concerned with convincing the reader that he is sane. Poe's narrator is clearly insane, and everything he does within the text proves this insanity to the reader.
Works cited
Poe, Edgar A. The Tell-Tale Heart. New York: Learning Corp. of America, 1953.
