Interprettive Essay: The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe

Insanity Your Honor and Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury the caretaker in Edgar Allan Poe’s”The Tell-Tale Heart” is Insane; using the McNaughton rule proves that he should be placed in a state hospital for the criminally insane, He did not know what he was doing, He did not know that what he was doing was wrong. The caretaker is insane because the sounds he hears that causes him to go insane.

The Sins Within “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe and “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathanial Hawthorne “Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, cost you more than you want to pay,” by unknown. The life of sins are revealed in both “The Tell- Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe and in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”. Beginning with “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Poe there is this man watching over an old man that he loves dearly, but cannot seem to do right by. Everyday he would stare into this old man’s pale blue eye with the thought that he was haunting him.

Edgar Allan Poe, an eerie author, was always writing dark stories and poems, which was unusual for the time period he wrote in. During his writing career he wrote many stories that were closely related to his life, especially tragic love stories. When many of his girlfriends and family died, he went mad, drank a lot and eventually died. After reading Poe’s stories that include topics like people in love who pass, dying from tuberculosis and being caught between rationality and irrationality, it is evident that he drew from his own life as inspiration. Poe was constantly devastated by his significant other dying and this happens in lots of his stories and poems too. For example, in The Bridal Ballad, it says “ And My Lord he loves me well.”

And now a new anxiety seized me -- the sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man’s hour had come! Here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!”. Due to the narrators anxiety it made her commit the crime and while it has been established that she is mentally ill, in this state it only incites her anxiety and pushed her to commit this crime.

From this piece of evidence, it is obvious that this killer is more than just a madman, and may instead be a calculated killer. This leads us into discussing the possibility of the killer not being eligible for the protection of the Eighth Amendment but being eligible for the death

Would you kill someone or something to stop being irritated by them? In The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, we get the inside scoop of the murder our unnamed narrator committed. This nameless man decided to kill his neighbor because he felt discomfort every time the victim’s eye looked at him (pg. 132). This madman decided that the only way to stop the piercing blue eye was to kill its owner. We can all relate to this psychopath even though most of us feel like we could never commit such a crime.

One great example of the murderer being sane is the fact that he hid the body, rather than leaving it on the bed and not trying to hide it. If the murderer were to be insane he would have simply left the body on the bed and would not have tried to hide it, as the murder would not have been wrong in his mind. The murderer also kept a tub under the old man during the murder to

Killing somebody is not always done with premeditation or intentionality. The killer is not always trying to actively kill someone because he or she is an unbalanced, dangerous person. The killer could have ended the life of someone without actually wanting it. The insanity defense, in that sense, protects a killer from an involuntary purposeful assassination. It can be applied to several cases, as the one that brought insanity defense into existence.

First-Degree Murder is the most serious crime that can be committed, punishable by the death penalty. Once someone commits this crime, they are forever known as a dangerous and terrible person. The decision to murder someone is usually conscious, but in some occasions the suspect can plead innocent for reasons of temporary insanity. In the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, a man decided to murder his neighbor because he was scared of the neighbor’s eye. When the police came to interrogate him, the man heard a heartbeat in his head.

He refers to himself as Death, implying he has all knowledge and power over the old man. The reader becomes filled with dread as the man patiently waits to kill. The imagery portrayed in “The Tell-tale Heart” increases the demented tone that the narrator projects as the main character waits to strangle the old man. Every night, for a week, the murderer would “look in” upon the victim as he slept.

Insanity is a disease capable of making a person lose control of themselves. On the other hand, sanity is when a person is what others call “normal”. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe the narrator kills a man and he is confessing to the cops about it. He confesses how long the murder took and what he did each night and how he executed the murder. However, the narrator is not guilty because of the reason of insanity.

All of his deranged actions validate his madness. The narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is discernibly a madman. His motives, actions, and thoughts prove his insanity. The definition of insanity fits the narrator to a T. His psychosis controlled his behaviors and pushed him into chopping up another human being and disposing the pieces like

Obsession, internal conflict, and underlying guilt are all aspects of being human but when it’s associated with paranoia and insanity it may be just the recipe for the perfect crime as perceived by Edger Allan Poe in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Poe uses this as one of his shortest stories to discuss and provide an insight into the mind of the mentally ill, paranoia and the stages of mental detrition. The story 's action is depicted through the eyes of the unnamed delusional narrator. The other main character in the story is an old man whom the narrator apparently works for and resides in his house. The story opens off with the narrator trying to assure his sanity then proceeding to tell the tale of his crime, this shows a man deranged and hunted with a guilty conscience of his murderous act.

The tell-tale heart is not a typical short story. It gives you an intens shiver which passes through your bones since you read the first sentences, even though this is one of the shortest stories written by Edgar Allan poe. Treating themes such as paranoia, stalking and human intelligence this story let you feel there's something wrong in the author mind. I wish you all read this story already, to understand how the story gains intensity increasing the terror around the figure of the author, which since the beginning attempt to rationalize his irrational behavior, literally terrorizing the reader, it is an incredible emotional challenge, even though as the whole story seems brutal and prive of sense during your first reading.

Ironically, the murderer resembles Poe, in the way that “He had the faculty of detaching himself from the present and of imagining unseen continents”(Bloom3 80). Also, in the beginning of the story, “Our narrator says that the old man’s “vulture” eye was the reason for the murder, but no rational person could see that as a reason for a murder”(McArthur 85). Although his actings and sayings of craziness is shown after his murder, “Tell-Tale Heart” implies that the character was psychotic since the beginning of the tale. However; it is certain that acting of murder caused the main character to be obsessed with what he did, and his insanity which was brought next caused him to bring death to his