The Tell Tale Heart Conscience Essay

Words: 1924
Pages: 8

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” exemplifies the societal ignorance of a man’s conscience. Through the story it reflects how a guilty conscience always abides by the ones who commit the greatest of immoral deeds. Moral of the story is that the ones who perform an immoral act, often coincide through extreme obvious tokens of actions that lead to their ultimate disgrace. The main character, the old man, is being taken care by the caretaker – the narrator – who inevitably wants to get rid of the owner due to the caretaker’s irresistible perturbation towards the owner’s vulture-eye. As the story transpires, the narrator’s antsy and the unfolding of his guilty conscience is exhibited through a number of figurative tokens.
Comprehensively, the narrator is constantly professing his sanity as a means of verification supporting his mental stability. At one
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If looked into it, the character is actually taking an overwhelm amount of time trying to take out this act. Mentioned in the story, “it took me an hour to place my whole bed within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed” (767). Also pointed out, the narrator waited eight days spying on the old man, before he attacked. The strange exact timing pointed out by Poe represents his loneliness in a phase where we already know the narrator has “problems sleeping at night”. For Edgar Allan Poe, human thought and motive were most often than not considered a precarious attempt of leading men into self-created psychopathic actions (Gargano 3). Here the narrator is losing his mental sanity to a point where he, himself, is not aware of his actions and capabilities of his attitudes. The narrator is being portrayed as his own worst enemy. His pathologic motives were “self-created” and as a result, he delineates a character full of his own self-misery, leading up to inadequate conscience