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The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allen Poe: Can We Trust The Narrator?

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Can you trust the narrator in Edger Allen Poe’s short-story/poem is accurately portraying the events? The short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” was written by Edgar Allen Poe, Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic, who is best known for his poetry and short stories. Edgar Allen Poe was born on January 7, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. He died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland. The American short-story writer, poet, critic and editor who was famous for his cultivation of mystery and macabre. The reader cannot trust the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” to accurately portray the events in the short-story because he is insane. The narrator's unreliability relies on his attempts to confuse the reader, to digress and thus bury his omission of relevant information. …show more content…

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 is a story about a nameless narrator who claims that he is not insane but rather has some sort of “disease”(Poe 303). A disease that has “sharpened [his] senses”(Poe 303). To prove that he isn’t insane, he begins by saying, “How, then, am I mad? Hearken!

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