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The Tell Tale Heart Analysis

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” is a short story about how a murderer’s conscience overtakes him and whether the narrator in the story is defined as insane or if he suffers from over acuteness of the senses throughout his life. This story shows the internal conflict and obsession, presenting a tortured soul due to a guilty conscience. The story begins with an unnamed narrator describing to the reader a man disturbed and haunted by his paranoia. This reason is because of the crime he committed of killing an old man. He becomes focused on the victim’s (the old man’s) eye, and his moral sense forces him to criticize the eye. Finally, the reader is taken on a path through the planning and execution of bloodshed at the hands of the narrator. One major literary theme Poe proposes in “The Tell Tale Heart.” Is that the narrator is insane due to his affirmations of sanity. “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.” (542, Poe) According to this context the narrator was hearing things that weren’t really there. In his confession, the narrator claimed he had a very sharp sense of hearing. It seems that the narrator cannot differentiate between things he’s actually hearing and things that he’s just picturing in his head-you can’t actually hear sounds coming from heaven and hell. If an individual who is actually insane has a difficult time
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