Insanity In The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

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“Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the planks-here. Here!- It is the beating of his hideous heart!” The narrator thinks he hears the beating heart, but it is all in his head. In the story, The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator kills an old man because he is afraid of the old man’s eye. The police suspect nothing until the narrator believes he hears the beating of the dead man’s heart, and admits the crime. The narrator thought killing the old man was the right thing to do, and he kept trying to convince the reader that he was sane. Without a doubt, the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart is insane, and should be punished. To be sane, you have to have a sense of right and wrong, and understand reality. However, the narrator thought …show more content…
In the story, he says, “I heard all things in the heaven and the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” (Poe) To put it another way, the narrator thinks that he is sane, but knows that we question his sanity. So, multiple times throughout the story he asks us why we think that he’s mad. By trying to convince us that he’s sane, he’s just denying to himself, that he’s insane. Some may say that the narrator is sane because he tells the story very calmly. They could argue that this means that by telling it calmly, he understands reality. However, he is actually calm because he thinks that what he did was right. In the text, he says, “Observe how healthily-how calmly I can tell you the whole story” (Poe). This shows that he does not understand reality, and the difference between right and wrong. The narrator tells the story calmly, because he’s trying to convince the reader that he’s sane, and that what he did was right, but he doesn’t realize that he is actually insane, and what he did was definitely not right. In final analysis, the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart is insane and should definitely be punished. This is because he thought that it was okay to kill the old man, he went to great lengths to convince us that he was sane, and he told the story calmly because he thought what he did was right. Only an in insane person could be terrified by a beating
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