Emotions In The Tell Tale Heart

Sometimes, emotions are difficult things. It’s no different in The Tell Tale Heart. This story tells the tale of a murderer, who we will call X, and the victim, who we will call Y. This story has been controversial over all the years it’s been published. Some view this tale as a story of love and hate, while others see it as a tale of hatred and revenge. Though, the way you see this story depends on simply what you think. The three traits we will be focusing on are emotions, personalities, and love.

X’s emotions are the most difficult to define. One moment, he seems to be in love, almost infatuated with Y, but then moments later, he states how much he dislikes the man. X says “I loved the old man. he had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.” With this, most would think that there would be no reason for murder. X seems to have nothing against Y! Why would murder even be such a thing in what seems like a sweet story? Moments after saying this, X says “I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this!”. Now it seems like they are trying to defend their reason for murder, that they had a perfectly normal reason to kill Y. He states that the eye was “A pale blue eye, with a film over it.” Though this sounds unsettling, would it be reasonable to kill someone over their eye?

He would state his hatred, and quickly follow up with the fact that he did this was because of his eye. It’s almost like he just killed him, purely out of spite. Maybe the old man had lived a life with wealth and possibly fame, and X was jealous because of this. Maybe Y didn’t seem to pay enough attention to X, and X found that the only way to capture his line of sight would be to murder him. X may not even care for Y at all, and is simply tricking the reader into thinking that he does so that the crime does not sound as bad as it may