“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that deals with the narrators struggle to convince the reader he is not insane. It is told from a first person point of view so the reader only has one side of the story to work with. Therefore, the reader only knows what the narrator thinks and sees. However, in the end narrator does reveal his insanity, and he reveals it through his obsessions.

In the story the man for eight consecutive nights goes to the bedroom of an old man he is taking care of. He stands at the door watching the man sleep with a single ray of light pointing directly at the old mans “evil eye” which he despises of. On the eighth night, the old man is sitting up in bed with his eye open, and the man, enraged by the eye and the sound of the man’s beating heart, races into the room and kills the man in his bed. After the murder, the narrator dismembers the body, and buries the old man under his floor. At the end of the story the police come to investigate the screams that were heard by the neighbors. Just as the man had conv

From a psychological aspect of the story, the narrator thinks he is a normal man, but he is clearly suffering from a mental illness. What he states in the beginning of the story as “the disease” leads me to believe that he is a paranoid schizophrenic. He goes on to express many symptoms of the disease. What he thinks of as sharpened senses and acute sense of hearing such as the sound old mans heart beat was an example of his mind playing tricks on him. Also his obsessive fear of the old mans eye portrayed an example of paranoia. Many people who suffer from the disease often do not know they are sick just as the man.

inced the police there was no foul play the man reveals his true self. He hears the sounds of the beating heart under the floor and in fear that the police will hear it he finally admits to the crime he had committed.

The theme of the story is that one can only put on a front for so long but eventually your real self will reveal. As the story progresses, the man continually tries to convince the reader he is not insane, but his attempts drastically fail in the end. The narrator

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