"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a suspenseful story based around a murder by a madman. Although murders are traditionally person versus person, the madman's murder is basically person versus himself. The narrator perceives the idea of killing an elderly man with an evil eye that haunts him. The madman believes his madness is a gift and has sharpened his senses, allowing him to perfectly commit this murder. The murderer, being mad, is paranoid of everything during his murder of the old man; in the end it is because of his "gifted" sense of hearing and his madness that he gives away the fact that he killed the old man. Conceived within his mind, the murder has little or none to do with the victim, the motive is unclear and the murder is unprovoked. The "disease" of madness within the person causes the conflict in this story, person versus himself.
The narrator's belief in his madness causes him to believe that he could commit the perfect murder of
The murderer had had no grudge or ill feelings towards the victim, it is in the murderer's own mind that a motive exists. The madness that the murderer possesses is that drives him to murder because of only the "evil eye" of the prey. "Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult…it was his eye…I made up my mind to take the life of the old man," (Poe 123). It was but a vulturous eye that led the madman to murder. Driven by nothing but his madness and his hatefulness for his victim's eye, he becomes obsessive and irrational, as a madman would. The idea that the man convinces himself of his hate for the man's eye and his exaggeration of his motives proves the conflict is more person vs. himself than person vs. person is, which is typical in a murder story.
The madman believes that he being mad causes his acute sense of hearing. "The disease has sharpened my senses - not destroyed
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