The Tell-Tale Heart Insanity

While reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” written by Edgar Allen Poe, I could not help but to notice the mental conflict the narrator portrayed. Through obvious statements from the narrator and my own insinuations, I believe it is safe to conclude that the narrator’s claim to sanity was unreliable and compromised due to his/her mental state. The narrator’s attempt to rationalize his rational behavior in the end caused him to be looked at as a madman, we see this by how “wisely” he executed and handled the old man’s body after killing him, and how his “sharpened senses” as he described early in the poem, ultimately was the reason why he confessed to his crime.
The story begins with how the narrator professes, “I loved the old man” and “He never wronged me”, then reveals how he was obsessed with the old man’s eye; “The eye of

The narrator begins to dismember the old man’s body and places it under the floor, and while doing so he takes delight in how cautiously he rids of any evidence that could incriminate him; “A tub had caught all – ha ha!” He attempts to show us that because of the “wise” precautions he took, no one could consider him to be mad, yet his actions proved otherwise to readers. With this wild laughter and behavior, he is showing that he has lost all logical capability, and the dismembering of the old man was an act of great anomaly.
The narrator mentioned earlier in the story; “The disease had sharpened my senses … I heard all things in the heaven and the earth.” There was not a specific disease mentioned in the story, so what disease could they be referring to? Could this sharpening of his senses be a metaphor to how hypersensitive and mad the narrator is, and that his act of not being sane be a dissimulation? These all are interpretations and points of view many readers could have from this story and rid the narrator’s credibility in telling this