~Tell Tale Heart Analysis~

Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell Tale Heart is one of his classics. The enthralling tale of a man so upset by the "evil eye" of the old man whom he lives with that he kills him in cold blood. And of course, the belief that the man was completely insane. Driven mad by the sound of the dead man's beating heart, the narrator loses his mind and tells the police where the chopped up body of the old man is. But is he actually crazy? Did he kill the old man? As readers, we can never be fully sure what really happened, as we can't go and ask Poe himself. But that makes it all the more interesting.

Personally, I believe the man actually was "touched" in the head. Most of Poe's stories and poems had a main character who wasn't completely sane, but that's what made his stories so great. Being inside the head of a madman and viewing the world from that perspective is something most people would think of writing about. But Poe does an excellent job at it.

To me, the story of The Tell Tale Heart is one of someone reaching the breaking point. For instance, the "evil eye" that provokes the man to commit murder could be seen as either a blind eye or one with cataracts. The fact that the eye appeared to stare into one's soul could imply that the eye couldn't see at all, so it appeared fixated at all times. People are unsettled by blind eyes for that very reason. And why should this man be any different? The only reason he is extremely unsettled by it is because he is slightly insane.

The parts where the man is being interviewed by the police is something that also could have been his insanity acting up. He describes how he was pacing and threw his chair at some point, yet the police continue to sit there and chat, seemingly oblivious to the deterioration of the man's mental state. This could be explained by the man simply imagining himself performing those actions, when he could actually be still sitting in the chair. But then this begs the question that if he could imagine that, couldn't he have imagined the whole murder? While this is also valid, I still believe that the man murdered the old man, but the murder itself was the breaking point to his mental stability, thus he begins to see and hear things after that.