...Imagine you were an old and you had this stranger watching you would you run or let him keep watching you? The narrator of “The Tale Tell Heart” watched the old man sleep for 7 nights on a row. In the beginning of the the book he talked about an illness. and he killed the old man over his eye. also after he killed him he smiled at the corpse then he chopped him into pieces. The reason that i think that the narrator is insane is because. in the beginning of the story he talked about an illness and back in the 1800’s there was not a lot of advanced medicine. and he could of had any disease. And he is arguing with himself that he is not insane. and that is normally a sign that you are insane. I think he is insane because. near the end he...
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...The narrator lives in his own imagination, and lives through his own god awful mind. When conceives of a vicious and evil plan he needs a way to get out without going to prison. He might be pretending to be someone he’s not, he may just be stupid, or he may just be insane. Whatever the reason for his awful choice to commit the crime that he does, now he just has to figure out exactly the way he plans on getting out without going to prison. The narrator faces mental disorders or so it seems. The narrator has this idea in his head that the old man’s eye is of pure evil. The eye made the narrators blood run cold. The fact that he is so vexed by the old man’s eye he believes that that gives him a reason or a motive to kill the old man. In describing the narrators mental health he could have either been very mentally unstable or just a complete genius. Is it possible that he could have been pretending, he could be trying to convince everyone that he is sane by trying to act sane which just made him look insane like reverse phycology. Or he could have just gone insane slightly when confessing to the murder because he was filled with so much guilt. The thing that made him seem insane was how he supposedly heard the old man’s heart beat after he was already dead “tear up the floor planks!—here, here!—it’s the beating of his hideous...
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...all have unreliable narrators. Although all of these narrators suffer from mental illnesses, the narrator from, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the most insane because she contributes to the most heinous acts. The narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” cannot witness reality because of hallucination. Others believe that the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” is more unreliable because he suffers from delusions and paranoia of an evil eye. While this statement is...
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...Love and Hate in Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” and Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Tell Tale Heart” and in Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover,” both unnamed narrators commit murder and provide the audience with a seemingly unjustifiable reason as to why they murder their loved ones. In “Tell Tale Heart” and in “Porphyria’s Lover,” both narrators attempt to pose to the audience that they are not insane and effectively accomplish this through their tone and explicit narration. Two of the recurring themes within both Poe’s short story and Browning’s poem are madness and the tension between love and hate. The themes are reinforced through calm tone and passive tone and through the characterization of the narrators. In Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart,” the narrator opens up the short story denying the fact that he is insane and defends his statement by confessing to killing an old man in a very calculated and precise manner with the simple motivation being his fear of the old man’s “eye of a vulture.” The narrator goes through with his plan of murdering the old man and hides the body only to be engulfed by a feeling of guilt which leads him to confessing his act to the police. Throughout the short story, the narrator continues to tell the audience that he is not insane due to his “sharpened … senses” and his “calm” way of telling the whole story, yet it is his tale of murder that contradicts the very claim that he attempts to defend throughout the short story...
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...not one man’s actions are abnormal, it is society that has the power to deem them as rational or insane. For example, Martin Luther King was regarded as simply another advocate for black rights during his time as a young leader because he lacked the power to actually create significant change in communities. However, when he gained enough of a following, he had the power to negatively impact the hold whites had on restricting blacks’ rights. This led radical whites to attempt to shut him down, many calling him...
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...“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe is about a person who is trying to kill the old man he works for over a series of days. The reason was the old man's eye. The old man ends up dying, but it didn't take long before the narrator confesses his actions from all his guilt built inside. For me that is insanity. One reason I have to prove the narrator's insanity is that he killed the old man because he couldn't stand his eye. Even though the old man was nice and kind to him. According to the passage, it says “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!”. The text also says “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man and thus rid myself of the eye forever”....
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...view. The main character wants to show he is not insane, and even offers a story as proof. The narrator’s decision to kill the old man so that the eye would stop looking at him marked the initial situation. The motives of the killer aren’t understood, which makes the murder mystery difficult to understand. Was the narrator insane? Did he kill the old man in self-defense? As such, the fear of death is expressed in the text. For example, “I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.” This excerpt illustrates the narrator’s thoughts of mortality. “Yes, he was stone, stone dead”, depicts how the narrator continued to express the old man’s death in a conspicuous/ distinct manner. Edgar Allen Poe can build so much fixated context over the old mans “vulture eye”, amplifying the use of imagery in the text. “You fancy me mad...You should have seen how wisely I proceeded.” This is ironic because the man tells himself he is normal that he is killing a man because of his eye. Another example is, “a pale blue eye, with a film over it.” The symbol in this quote was the film over the eye, how the man couldn't see as well what was going on right under his nose. Poe creates confusion using his pandemonium literature to render the imagery of the story. Whether or not the old man was a vulture like person, the audience doesn’t know. However, that’s what he symbolizes to the narrator. If the narrator is afraid of the vulture’s eye, and vultures...
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...sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?” Upon reading the very first paragraph of the Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, many, if not all, readers can imply that there is something peculiar about the narrator. If some readers were not convinced enough to believe that he is insane from this paragraph, the rest of the story certainly will prove his insanity. Throughout the tale, the narrator desperately tries to defend himself and prove that he is sane by telling...
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...Really how insane was the narrator of “The Tell Tale Heart”? Many people have different opinions about whether he was mentally unstable or not. Would killing an innocent person because of their eye prove someone crazy? This story is about an insane person (the narrator) that murders a poor old man because his eye bothered him. The narrator had no other motives to kill the old man besides his eye, in fact he claims that he loved the old man. Little did he know that the crime would come back to bite him in the butt. The narrator looked through the crack of the old man’s door each night and stayed there for hours on end. He was very cautious with his actions though, because the old man was very fearful of death and could sense things and he heard just about everything. The narrator was never kinder to the old man than the week before he killed him, probably because he wanted to leave things on a good note before the old man passed. Being kind to the old man before he died would show some sanity wouldn’t it? According to the narrator, the old man was rich but that’s not why he killed him, he just wanted to get rid of his eye. The narrator had some sort of disease that “sharpened his senses” not dulled them. His hearing was the sense most affected by the disease. The narrator claimed that he could hear all...
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...“The scariest monsters are the ones that lurks within our souls,” says Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator in the story The Tell Tale Heart is a good example of this quote because even same people can be monsters.The narrator was not insane when he murdered the old man; therefore, he is guilty. Throughout the story the narrator tries to convince the reader he is not insane. For example, “Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded - with what caution - with what foresight, with what dissimulation I went to work!” Crazy people can not tell you anything. He is telling us the truth. He knew how to protect in getting rid of the old man.This good evidence because he would get arrested for getting rid...
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...novelists was inspired to include this conflict in their works. Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, the black cat, is a great example of how the literature reflected the conflict of the real world. In the horrific short story, the black cat, by Edgar Allan Poe, the reader follows the mind of a reflective 1.st person narrator, whose sanity and reliability is constantly questioned. To do this, Poe uses many literary techniques, which add up to the constant questioning of the narrator’s reliability. One technique is the distancing of norms and values between the reader and the narrator. An example proving this is the clinical and calmly description of how the narrator plans to hide the carcass of his wife: “Many projects entered my mind.” Notice how the narrator thinks rationally about hiding the carcass because it has a significant meaning later on in the interpretation. One might think that this is a sure sign that the narrator is completely insane, but because Poe uses a 1.st person narrator, he is, arguably off course, able to justify all his wicked actions. This is partly due to the 1.st person reflective point of view, where the reader follows the mind of the narrator, but also due to the narrator’s constant tries to convince the reader that he is rational and sane, and in such a degree that he is stating his sanity in the beginning of the short story. “Yet, mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream.” Other techniques used, which adds up to the questioning of the narrator’s...
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...protagonist, is faced with his biggest problem yet, himself. Within the story, he is faced with guilt, perhaps too much guilt for one to handle. The unknown narrator is seen as an insane individual through his constant paranoia, neurotic thoughts, and unstable actions. The mad man is clearly able to demonstrate his insanity with his constant paranoia towards the old man. Throughout the text, the narrator expresses his ongoing feelings of paranoia towards the evil eye. He believes the eye haunts his every waking hour, till he finally decides to rid himself from the eye once and for all, “I was never...
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...The narrator of the story is insane because of his suffering from madness, past made him insane, his dead wife inspired most of his stories. The narrator of the story is suffering from madness. The narrator was in poverty barely supporting himself. His work never brought him money. He lost hope and suffered from depression. His only happiness was his wife, who died a year later. He got expelled from some universities. His mom died while he was young. He was moved around from family to family. His past made him insane. The narrator suffered a horrible past. After his birth his father left him, and a year later his mother died. He was expelled from the United States Military Academy. His work wasn’t bringing him money. His short stories brought...
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...Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe tells the story of how the narrator who was assumed to be mad for killing an old man. The old man has an eye like a vulture and the narrator said this old man’s eye is an evil eye; according to the story he said “one of his eyes resembled that of a vulture-a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (39). The story shows guilt and emotional breakdown, but sometimes feel emotional disturbance. The tone at the beginning of the story is eerie because the narrator is talking about an evil eye and then he goes on to say how he watches the old man late at night for hours, just looking at his eye, studying him, and not saying a word. At the beginning of the story, the narrator questions his sanity, saying "...why will you say I am man? (39)" For him to come out and say this statement, I feel everyone has seen him as an insane person, because people believe that it is impossible to kill your rich and wealthy master just because of his eyes; someone would have done that because of his wealth and riches, but his case was different, that is why they see him to be insane. This was what made him tell his story in a gentle approach. He was making his point to the person, telling him or her that he is not insane, and he knows what he is doing and would not have killed the old man the way he did if he was insane. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator tells of his torture. He was disturbed by the old man's Evil Eye. The narrator had no ill will against the old man himself, he...
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...In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat”, many things are repeated and follows a similar pattern to the rest of his stories. A black cat is killed and a very similar one is found shortly after, all while the narrator is losing his mind. Through the use of diction and syntax, Poe reveals that the narrator's voice is mad. The narrator uses syntax to affect his voice and to sound insane. Not only are his ideas insane but also the way he describes them. Through the use of long, run on sentences as a form of syntax, the narrator describes many ideas at once. After stating a few ideas, “...[he] resolved to dig a grave in the floor of the cellar… casting it in the well in the yard---about packing it up in a box as if merchandise…[he] determined...
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