Paranoid Schizophrenia In Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart

Paranoid Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which a person distrusts a person based on the delusions and hallucinations they experience. “Poe’s tale has attracted the attention of numerous critics, who have discussed its various aspects through diversified approaches, especially psychoanalysis, since the mid-twentieth century.”(Shen, 327-28). The Tell-Tale Heart is a short story by Edgar Allen Poe that tells the story of an unnamed narrator who plots to kill his roommate because of his “Evil Eye”; the story later reveals how his insanity influences his downfall. Those with Paranoid Schizophrenia are not reliable sources of information to explain a situation truthfully. One of the effects of Paranoid schizophrenia is that the narrator

Shen talks about the point when the narrator goes insane over the beating of the fantastical heart that keeps beating (which isn’t the dead man’s heart or what Shen is trying to disprove, the narrator's heart) but that the main factor that remained the same is that the same policemen cannot hear the heart beating. This is what causes the narrator to accept the pretense that mocks his own horror. (Shen, 335). This connects to the last paragraph because the auditory hallucinations that he is experiencing are making him lose focus of his senses, ergo, distorting the reality of the situation. Robinson talks about the various reactions of the narrator to his “over acuteness of the senses' ' such as when the narrator claims that the disease sharpened his senses, not dulled them. Then he talks about the narrator's sensitivity to sight which refers to the main symbol of the story, the “evil eye”, “A pale blue eye, with a film over it,” which caused him to kill the neighbor in the first place. (Robinson, 370). This hallucination is key to the plot and shows how the narrator was insane because there's no reason for a single pair of eyes to influence someone to murder them. Shen looks over the topic of how the narrator's supernatural powers are evidence of sheer madness, but he disagrees, “...and the end of a tale suggests that Poe wants us to take the over-acute hearing as a fantastic fiction fact.

Zimmerman mentions how the narrator started to tell the story calmly, “how calmly I can tell you the whole story.”, but then the moment the narrator recalls the beating of the old man’s heart, he lost his temper, “The old man’s terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!-”. (Zimmerman, 42). Changing a perspective on an entire story, in general, is what makes the story automatically untrustworthy because his mood changes influence his focus on the story. Zimmerman also talks about how the narrator assumes that the audience will be sharing similar emotions about his action, “Oh, you would have a laugh to see how cunningly I thrust it in!” even though he pitied the victim, he however, “chuckled at heart.”(Zimmerman 43). This correlates to the topic, showing how guilty the narrator was and thought that all his actions are believed by everyone so he tells it as if everything is ok. “The protagonist thinks that he can get rid of the old man’s eye by murder, but he is pursued by the victim’s heart as a tool or symbol of revenge, a fantastic heart that dramatically starts beating again when the murder is in a most confident, triumphant, and cheery mood.”(Shen, 337). This proves that the narrator is insane and that he isn’t in the right mind because he is happy in a murder that is wrong on many