Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart”: An Analysis

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” is a story that creates a suspenseful and creepy theme that delves into the narrator’s madness. The Character, in this case, the narrator, is someone who appears to be very intensely nervous and impulsive. It is evident that the character is undergoing a lot of mental stress, and that he does not have the proper capacity to handle such negative feelings. His consciousness is outright out of norm as he is not able to differentiate between reality and his hallucinations or illusions. In the story, the narrator never revealed his name or provided any description about himself. He states what he did, he says what he feels, and he imparts his experiences in a subjective manner, but the reader is rarely given any direct object by which to know the narrator’s character. Edgar Allan Poe successfully invites the reader to create their own opinion and image of the central character. It is up to the reader to arrive to a conclusion through lots of investigation and reading in between the lines.
“I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye … but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.  “
From this passage, two traits of the narrator are revealed. The reader can infer that the narrator is paranoid and insane. The narrator’s insanity is obvious in the way he talks and the way he forms his thoughts about situations in his life. In this particular situation, his insanity is evident in his belief that his roommate is in possession of an evil eye, which causes the narrator to sense an immense amount of danger, and fear. The narrator believes that the old man is dangerous which makes him decide to murder the old man, chop his body into pieces and hide the body parts under the floorboards. No sane person w...