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An Unreliable Narrator In Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

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Heart racing, breathing accelerating, perspiration building and hallucinations forming. A person dealing with this hectic state is in no good condition to tell a story from. A good narrator is aware, alert, in good health and is truthful. Under the stress of either a certain situation or even a mental illness, these characteristics of a good narrator become altered, twisted, and/or mutated. There are many stories that include a narrator who has hallucinations and is depicted as one with a mental illness. Such as, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” features a caretaker who murders an old man for having uneasy feelings about his eye. “Strawberry Spring,” written by Stephen King, pictures a narrator who brutally slaughters innocent people …show more content…

The narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” experiences hallucinations which causes him to be an unreliable source of info. One could argue that the woman from “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an unreliable narrator because she also experiences hallucinations. She says, “The front pattern DOES move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Gilman 9). The woman does indeed have delusions; however, she only has them due to her isolation from regular everyday human life and activities. On that note, the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” says, “I admit the deed!--Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!” (Poe 4). The caretaker appears to be losing his mind here over his apparent recognition of hearing the heart of the old man still beating. Strangely enough, this man is undeniably dead. Yet, the narrator argues that he can still hear his heart beating and it is beating, in fact, so loud to where he just cannot take it anymore. The narrator is really concerned about the old man’s particular eye. When he does kill the old man, he announces, “His eye would trouble me no more” (Poe 3). Clearly, the caretaker is imagining that the old man’s eye specifically exists in this world to cause him trouble and/or suffering. It is hinted in the story that the old man is blind. Therefore, the old man cannot give his caretaker any sort of ‘evil eye’ to make him feel that way. The hallucinations that the narrator from “The Tell-Tale Heart” sees make him the most unreliable because he is unaware of what is real life and what is

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Imagine waking in the middle of the night and seeing a pair of eyes glaring at you as you lay in bed. In the story ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe, the murderer stares at his victim while he is sleeping for seven nights in a row before he commits the murder. The narrator justifies his actions by claiming that the old man's eye was evil. It is also perceived that the narrator has a disease or mental illness. On the day of the murder, the madman went into the old man's room and threw his bed over him.

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A murder over a eye? It seems like a silly idea but that is exactly what happens in the thrilling story The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. In The Tell-Tale Heart, The main character(the narrator) is trying to prove his point of not being mad by describing in great detail the murder he committed. The narrator wants to kill the old man because of his eye and for seven nights he watches the old man in hopes of seeing the eye to give him the rage he needs to kill him. On the eighth night, the narrator accidentally wakes the old man and finally sees the old man’s vulture eye.

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The old man’s evil eye drove the narrator absolutely crazy. Everyone has that one thing in the world that they just cannot tolerate, it bugs them so much that it causes them to do things that they normally wouldn’t do, especially if they are mentally unstable. Obviously by the way the narrator thought “And now my anxiety seized me…. With a loud yell I opened the lantern and leaped into the room.” He couldn’t control himself and let his emotions get the best of him.

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”You can’t imagine how stealthily,stealthily until,at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from the crevice and full upon the vulture eye”(PG 540). He wanted to sneak into the old mn room slowly with a low dim lantern, waiting for the .”Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door”(PG 538). The narrator wanted to get inside the old man room without waking the old man up. He is really sneaky in this part of the story.     The final trait the narrator represents in “The Tell Tale Heart” is insanity.

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Based on this, the narrator is perceived as a mental person. It appears he believes the old man and the old man’s eyes are two different things. The storyteller’s main focus is the eye. From this paragraph, the readers do not know whether the narrator is going to kill or take out the old man’s eyes. Due to this, it creates a spooky and a threatening

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Evil is all around us and it can be hard to tell who is consumed by it and who is not. In the fictional short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator is consumed by his charge’s eye, to where he devises a plan on killing the old man. The story begins when the narrator becomes a caretaker to an old man with an “odd” eye. Becoming consumed by the man’s eye, he devises a plan to kill the old man so he, the narrator, will be at peace when the deed is done. He, meaning the narrator, is a calculated killer because he had came up with a plan to kill the old man because of his eye.

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I heard all things in heaven and in the Earth. I also heard many things in hell. The narrator of “Tell Tale Heart” is insane because he wanted to take the life of an old man just because of an eye that scared the narrator. Therefore makes the narrator crazy The narrator of “Tell Tale Heart” is also insane because he said he could the extent of my powers; of my sagacity.

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“The Tell-Tale Heart” In the beginning readers encounter the unknown narrator who claims to be nervous and oversensitive. Further reading reveals that the narrator continues asserting that he is not mad by showing calmness to proof the case for his sanity. He further reveals to the reader how he loves one old man who has never done anything wrong to him. The narrator further asserts his obsession with the old man’s filmy blue eyes. The author compares the old man’s eye colors to those of a vulture, this basically portrays the fear that the narrator possesses.

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In The Tell Tale Heart, the unreliable narrator lived with the man he use to take care of and loved. He got annoyed by the glass eye he had, he thought the eye could see through him and his thoughts. He planned it for 8 days how he’d kill him, so he knew what he was doing, and watched him at night. The narrator also chopped him up into little pieces and put him under the floorboards, the police came from a neighbor calling the police.

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In the short-story it states “TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” This shows that the narrator is paranoid because it says he was nervous and he still is and that he was mad. Also in the Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe the narrator is guilty of murder because the narrator thinks the old man could never suspect that his caregiver would ever try to kill him, he claims he can recite the story calmly and healthily as he remembers every detail unlike an insane person. The narrator cannot accurately portray the events happening because he is paranoid, so he can not be

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The Tell-Tale Heart written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1843 is about a man who claims he is not insane but only nervous. In turn, he tells a story to defend his sanity, in which he confesses to have killed an old man. He claims that his ambition was neither passion nor greed for money, but actually uneasiness of the old man’s pale blue eyes. He continues to insist that he isn’t mad because of his calm and collected actions. Even though he is a murderer, he claims that his composed actions aren’t ones of a psychopath.

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The Tell-Tale Heart Argumentative Paragraph In the story, “ The Tell-Tale Heart ,” Poe gives ideas which could prove that the narrator is criminally insane. The narrator could be named mad for some of his many actions and thoughts. The facts supporting this include: the defendant killed the old man over his “evil eye”, he brutally murdered the man and dismembered his body, he has to remind himself that he isn’t mad even though he committed murder, and states that he hears the dead man's heartbeat get louder and louder until he confesses murder. To begin with, the defendant kills the old man he lived with over his “evil” eye. He states that it gets to him, and drives him to eventually, after the 8th night, kill him.

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Even though the old man is good and has never cause any harm to the caretaker, the caretaker wishes to harm the old man. The narrator tells us that he wishes to harm the old man because he has a little and seemingly unimportant detail, his glass eye. The narrator tells us that the eye is like the one of a vulture. The caretaker begins plotting against the old man, he began constantly visiting the old man during the night and watches the old man while he sleeps but because

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Suspense by Edgar Allen Poe Suspense is a writing style that authors use to make it so a reader is ahead of the characters in the story. Edgar Allen Poe profoundly used this technique in his story “Tell Tale Heart”. The narrator is psychotic and is particularly tormented by an old man’s ‘evil’ glass eye. He was willing to do close to anything to be rid of the eye, including murder.

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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.

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