The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” is insane. First, the narrator exhibits his insanity through his inability to tell right from wrong. The author believed that they did not have any madness, and that it was solely an acuteness of their senses. Clearly they could not tell that was wrong, and thought the disease sharpened their senses. During the narrator’s story, they reasoned that terminating the man was the right thing to do. The narrator decided to obviate the old man because he believed it was the right thing to do in order to remove his phobia of the eye. The reader perceives the narrator to be insane when he kills the old man without a second thought: “In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, …show more content…
The storyteller never thought that this was the wrong thing to do, which plays a major role in the reader believing that the author cannot tell right from wrong. Another way that the reader gets the impression that he is insane is when the narrator stands in the doorway of the old man’s bedroom for a week straight while he is sleeping. The narrator is viewed as strange by the reader, especially since he would break into the house but not maraud anything. As a result, these events lead Poe’s readers to believe that he cannot tell right from wrong. In addition, the narrator cannot control their compulsive behaviors. The first event that the storyteller shows the reader that he is insane is when he rips out the floorboards of the house. After burying the man’s body under the floorboards of the house, there was no way for the cops to find the body there. The police were attempting to ascertain what had happened. The narrator could not control their compulsive behaviors, and it resulted in him yelling to the cops that the old man was under the